SBIR Phase I: A Large-Area, High-Throughput Desktop Nanoprinter

这个小企业创新研究第一阶段项目将专注于开发一种新的纳米光刻仪器，该仪器将被学术界和工业界的研究人员和分析实验室广泛采用。该仪器将使研究人员能够快速和廉价地原型测试模式和设备（例如，用于合成和分析生物分子的芯片实验室系统，用于药物筛选和培养细胞研究的微芯片，催化活性材料的组合文库和功能电子/光子学）。基础聚合物笔光刻（PPL）和束笔光刻（BPL）技术已经实现了一系列以前不可能实现的应用，并引起了学术研究人员、化学和制药公司以及政府组织的极大兴趣。这种新型纳米打印工具将对纳米技术、物理学、电子学、化学、生物学和医学等许多研究领域产生广泛而变革性的影响。这个项目的智力价值将是将PPL和BPL转化为一种新的低成本，使用点纳米打印仪器，能够在厘米尺度上绘制各种软、硬材料的图案，具有无限的衍射，低于100纳米的空间分辨率和配准精度。这些技术克服了现有纳米制造方法的许多限制，然而，由于缺乏商业上可用的仪器，研究人员目前无法利用它们。该公司已经开发出PPL仪器的功能原型。拟议的研究将通过开发一种自动校准解决方案，实现快速可靠的调平，从而消除仪器商业化的一个关键障碍：目前手动、繁琐且容易出错的校准步骤，这是所有纳米图案化实验之前的步骤。设计一种廉价的集成照明模块与PPL系统是开发商用BPL仪器的重要一步。该系统能够以无掩模的方式在大面积上快速生成具有衍射无限特征尺寸的任意图案，这是该项目的另一个目标。除了硬件设计和开发外，还将开发PPL仪器的软件用户界面。

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will focus on the development of a new nanolithography instrument that will be widely adopted by researchers and analytical labs throughout academia and industry. The instrument will give researchers the ability to rapidly and inexpensively prototype test patterns and devices (e.g., lab-on-chip systems for synthesis and analysis of biomolecules, microchips for drug screening and investigation of cultured cells, combinatorial libraries of catalytically active materials, and functional electronics/photonics). The underlying polymer pen lithography (PPL) and beam pen lithography (BPL) technologies already have enabled a range of previously impossible applications and attracted significant interest from academic researchers, chemical and pharmaceutical companies, and government organizations. This novel nanoprinting tool will have a broad and transformative impact on many areas of research, spanning nanotechnology, physics, electronics, chemistry, biology, and medicine.The intellectual merit of this project will be the translation of PPL and BPL into a new low-cost, point-of-use nanoprinting instrument that is capable of patterning a broad variety of soft and hard materials over centimeter scales with diffraction-unlimited, sub-100 nm spatial resolution and registration accuracy. These techniques overcome many limitations of existing nanofabrication approaches, however, researchers are currently unable to take advantage of them due to the lack of commercially available instruments. The company has already developed a functional prototype of a PPL instrument. The proposed research will remove one of the key hurdles to commercializing the instrument: the current manual, tedious, and error-prone alignment step, which precedes all nanopatterning experiments, by developing an auto-alignment solution that enables quick and reliable leveling. The design of an inexpensive, integrated illumination module with the PPL system is an essential step toward developing a commercial BPL instrument. A system capable of rapidly generating arbitrary patterns with diffraction unlimited feature sizes over large areas in a mask-free manner represents another goal of the project. In addition to the hardware design and development, a software user interface for the PPL instrument will be developed.