Recent Advances in Unconventional Lithography for Challenging 3D Hierarchical Structures and Their Applications

In nanoscience and nanotechnology, nanofabrication is critical. Among the required processes for nanofabrication, lithography is one of core issues. Although conventional photolithography with recent remarkable improvement has contributed to the industry during the past few decades, fabrication of 3-dimensional (3D) nanostructure is still challenging. In this review, we summarize recent advances for the construction of 3D nanostructures by unconventional lithography and the combination of two top-down approaches or top-down and bottom-up approaches. We believe that the 3D hierarchical nanostructures described here will have a broad range of applications having adaptable levels of functional integration of precisely controlled nanoarchitectures that are required by not only academia, but also industry