Electrohydrodynamic Lithography of Functional Soft Materials for Advanced Applications

The control of patterns on sub-micrometre length scales is of considerable technological interest, and is especially relevant for tailoring the properties of novel functional materials. A variety of bottom-up and top-down techniques for patterning polymers have emerged in the past decade. The growing demand for better performance, reduced energy consumption, high-throughput and higher levels of complexity and integration raise the need for alternative technologies capable of generation or reproduction of patterns below the sub-100 nm. Successful cost-effective patterning processes are needed to enable straightforward high-fidelity patterning in a controlled manner on multiple-scales which will also be suitable for a broad range of materials. Development of such methods is essential for the successful future large-scale fabrication of advanced functional technologically appealing down-scaled devices. Here advances in the use of electric fields on a range of soft materials to generate complex patterns from thin films by exploiting surface instabilities are reviewed, that demonstrate a complementary and an elegant lithographic technique, limits of which are yet to be reached.