Bottom-up Fabrication of Nanoelectromechanical Systems by Two-layer Nanoimprint Lithography

Nanoelectromechanical Systems (NEMS) are being developed for a variety of applications as well as for accessing new regimes of fundamental research. NEMS are electromechanical systems --- much like Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) --- mostly operated in their resonant modes, with dimensions in the deep submicron. Up to now, for the most part, researchers\textbf{ }have employed ``\textit{top-down}'' techniques to create NEMS devices from semiconductor materials --- i.e., high-resolution lithography followed by various etching techniques. Here, we describe a ``\textit{bottom-up}'' imprint lithographic approach to fabricate freely suspended nanomechanical beam resonators. In this approach, we first fabricate an anchor layer upon the wafer using nanoimprint lithography and film deposition. A subsequent step of imprint upon the anchors followed by thin film deposition and lift-off creates the suspended nanomechanical devices. We have used optical displacement detection techniques to characterize the electromechanical properties of our devices.