Technical characteristics:

It allows the drawing of doth and lines with sizes as small as 20 nm under controlled conditions. Complex figures may also be realized.

Description

Is a nanolithography system that „prints” and „ink” directly on the substrate. The size of the geometrical features can vary from few tens of nanometers (in best conditions – 20 nm) up to several microns. It allows both a bottom-up approach and a top-down one when contructing the nanostructures. The working principle is that of wetting an AFM-type cantilever with an “ink” and writing down onto a substrate, similar with an ink pen that writes on a paper. The process is serial and is quite slow, but can be highly parallelized by using 2D arrays of cantilevers (55,000 such cantilevers on an array) and thus becomes efficient from the speed and throughoutput points of view. Many materials can be used as “inks”, as are solutions of polymers, small organic molecules, sol-gel precursors, macromolecules, nanoparticle colloids.

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Applications:

• surface functionalization (with direct liaison to proteomics, DNA recognition, virus identification);
• photolithographic masks correction;
• molecular electronics;
• realization of master stamps for NIL (Nanoimprint lithography);
• novel devices (photonic and electronic);

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Results:

It is newly put into function. We are still in te training period. However, some results are obtained, as seen in the figure.

Partneship:

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Last update:March 5, 2012