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，廉价地原型测试模式和设备（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和功能电子学/光子学）。底层的聚合物笔光刻（PPL）和光束笔光刻（BPL）技术已经实现了一系列以前不可能的应用，并吸引了学术研究人员，化学和制药公司以及政府组织的极大兴趣。这种新型的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。该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，该仪器能够在厘米尺度上对各种软硬材料进行图案化，衍射不受限制，亚100 nm的空间分辨率和配准精度。这些技术克服了现有纳米纤维方法的许多局限性，然而，由于缺乏商用仪器，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。拟议的研究将消除仪器商业化的关键障碍之一：目前的手动，繁琐和容易出错的对准步骤，这是所有纳米图案化实验之前，通过开发一种自动对准解决方案，实现快速和可靠的调平。 一个廉价的，集成的照明模块与PPL系统的设计是朝着开发商业BPL仪器的重要一步。该项目的另一个目标是，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的系统。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.