Soft nanolithography by polymer fibers

We report on the use of polymer fibers for large-area soft nanolithography on organic and inorganic surfaces with 50 nm resolution. The morphology of fibers and of the corresponding patterned gap is investigated, demonstrating a lateral dimension downscaling of up to nine times, which greatly increases the achieved resolution during pattern transfer. In this way, we realize poly­mer field effect transistors with channel length and width as low as 250 nm that are expected to show transistor transition frequency up to a few MHz, and are thus exploitable as low-cost radio-frequency identification devices.