Competitive Methods for Fabrication of Nanochips and Replacement of Au, Ag and Pd with Nonprecious Metals

Abstract

Electroless metallization technology which allowed replacing adequately Au and Ag with Ni-P or Ni-B alloys and simplifying significantly the metallization process was developed (1-5). Other proposed patentable nanomethods for the first time allow one to produce nanochips and photomasks with nano-sized adjacent elements by single optical UV photolithography (4). The proposed nanomethods are much more advantageous and simpler than other expensive and complicated methods such as e-beam, X-ray lithography or fabrication of the nanoelements using light phase shift photomasks. The proposed methods of metallization are widely used in electronics, piezoengineering and instrument-making. As a result Au, Ag and Pd were replaced with the alloys of non-precious metals, usage of toxic substances was eliminated. Methods of fabricating the ultra-thin pore free electroless coatings on micro-, meso- and nano-sized particles are proposed.