Suppression of the sidewall effect in pillar array columns with radially elongated pillars

•Radially elongated pillars (REPs) are effective in eliminating sidewall effects.•Sidewall effects become smaller at increasing REP aspect ratio.•Sidewall effects due to etching limitations can be eliminated using REPs.

An important bottleneck of pillar array columns designed for liquid chromatography is that small deviations of the target ‘magical distance’ at the sidewall region leads to detrimental sidewall effects, due to local differences of linear velocities at the sidewall region versus other locations in the pillar bed. In the present study, we demonstrate that a lateral elongation of the pillar significantly increases the tolerance for offsets of the magical distance. By shifting the sidewall distance 600 nm for 2 pillar aspect ratio (AR) designs (AR = 3 and 9), only minor sidewall effects on the measured plate heights could be observed for the AR = 9 columns, while the plate height was roughly doubled when using the wrong versus the correct sidewall distance for the AR = 3 columns. Technologically, this constitutes a huge advantage because small deviations (order of 100 nm) between the set and the finally achieved value for the inter-pillar distance are very common using mid-UV lithography based etching processes.