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

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.