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

SBIR 第一阶段：大面积、高通量桌面纳米打印机

• 批准号: 1621773
• 负责人: Andrey Ivankin
• 金额: $ 22.5万
• 依托单位: Tera-Print LLC
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-07-01 至 2017-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1621773&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SBIR; Phase; Large; Area; Throughput

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.

这个小型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且廉价地制作测试图案和设备的原型(例如，用于生物分子合成和分析的芯片实验室系统、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库以及功能电子学/光子学)。潜在的聚合物笔光刻(PPL)和束流笔光刻(BPL)技术已经实现了一系列以前不可能实现的应用，并吸引了学术研究人员、化学和制药公司以及政府机构的极大兴趣。这种新型的纳米印刷工具将对许多研究领域产生广泛和革命性的影响，涉及纳米技术、物理、电子、化学、生物和医学等领域。该项目的智力优势将是将PPL和BPL转化为一种新的低成本、可使用的纳米印刷仪器，能够以衍射无限的、低于100 nm的空间分辨率和配准精度在厘米尺度上绘制各种软和硬材料的图案。这些技术克服了现有纳米制造方法的许多局限性，然而，由于缺乏商业化的仪器，研究人员目前无法利用它们。该公司已经开发了PPL仪器的功能原型。拟议中的研究将消除该仪器商业化的关键障碍之一：目前的手动、繁琐且容易出错的对准步骤，在所有纳米颗粒实验之前，通过开发一种能够实现快速且可靠的水平调整的自动对准解决方案。设计一种廉价的、集成了PPL系统的照明模块是开发商业BPL仪器的关键一步。一种能够以无掩模方式在大面积上快速生成具有无限特征大小的衍射的任意图案的系统代表了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。