Micro-/Nanointegrated Fabrication Technique For Flexible Materials

In Chap. 2, we introduce a mass-production Si-based micro-/nanointegrated fabrication technique, which is simple, cost-efficient, and compatible with CMOS process. The fabricated samples show two important properties of wide-band anti-reflectance and stable super-hydrophobicity; thus, this novel Si-based micro-/nanointegrated fabrication technique has the attractive application potential. However, silicon is fragile and bio-incompatible, which hinds the further application of this technique in biomedical field. Therefore, we extend this micro-/nanointegrated fabrication technique from silicon to flexible materials, especially for biocompatible flexible materials, and then, a universal micro-/nanointegrated fabrication technology suitable for many materials is developed.As is mentioned previously, due to the combination of microstructures and nanostructures, micro-/nanohierarchical structures possess many attractive properties. Additionally, flexible materials have the outstanding flexibility and biocompatibility, which are widely used in microfluidics and biomedical fields. Thus, micro-/nanohierarchical structures based on flexible materials have a bright potential future. However, the traditional fabrication processes contain at least two steps (i.e., microfabrication and nanofabrication), which are complicated. In addition, the fabrication precision is not ideal at nanoscale level. Therefore, in order to overcome these drawbacks, we proposed a single-step fabrication technique based on the combination of ultra-low-surface-energy silicon mold and replication process of flexible materials to realize micro-/nanohierarchical structures with flexible materials. This single-step technique is simple, low cost, and of high-throughput, and more importantly, the fabricated samples show several remarkable properties.