In technology, soft lithography is a family of techniques for fabricating or replicatingstructures using "elastomeric stamps, molds, and conformable photomasks".[1] It is called "soft" because it uses elastomeric materials, most notably PDMS.
Soft lithography is generally used to construct features measured on the micrometer to nanometerscale. According to Rogers and Nuzzo (2005), development of soft lithography expanded rapidly from 1995 to 2005. Soft lithography tools are now commercially available.[2]
Xia, Y.; Whitesides, G. M. (1998). "Soft Lithography". Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. Engl. 37 (5): 551–575. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1521-3773(19980316)37:5<550::AID-ANIE550>3.0.CO;2-G. PMID 29711088. Archived from the original on 2011-08-12.
Xia, Y.; Whitesides, G. M. (1998). "Soft Lithography. In". Annu. Rev. Mater. Sci. 28: 153–184. Bibcode:1998AnRMS..28..153X. doi:10.1146/annurev.matsci.28.1.153.
Quake, S. R.; Scherer, A. (2000). "From micro- to nanofabrication with soft materials". Science. 290 (5496): 1536–1540. Bibcode:2000Sci...290.1536Q. doi:10.1126/science.290.5496.1536. PMID 11090344. S2CID 1386132.
Rogers, J. A.; Nuzzo, R. G. (2005). "February). Recent progress in soft lithography. In". Materials Today. 8 (2): 50–56. doi:10.1016/S1369-7021(05)00702-9.