Maskless Lithography System and Generation of High Density DNA Microarrays

"Recent developments in DNA microarray generation technology have made entirely new methods of gene analysis feasible. The DNA microarray can greatly facilitate research in the areas of drug and vaccine discovery, disease screening, and toxicology, amongothers. Therefore, the importance of a low-cost, high-resolution, high-throughput DNA microarray generation system cannot be understated. Current DNA microarray generation techniques suffer from severe limitations. The development of a new DNAmircoarray generation technique that has the high resolution of photolithography with the low cost of operation of mechanical deposition would significantly accelerate the pace of gene research. In this proposal, we present a method to generate DNAmicroarrays using a maskless lithography system. The maskless lithography system incorporates a large-array spatial light modulator to serve as a programmable mask. The spatial light modulator technology is integrated with Anvik's patented large arealithography technology to produce a breakthrough in lithography system development that allows rapid, high-density DNA microarray generation at low cost. In the Phase I program, we have developed the maskless lithography process specifically for DNAmicroarray generation. In the proposed Phase II program, we will construct a fully functional maskless lithography system and demonstrate the generation of DNA microarrays with an optimized process."