| Posted: September 14, 2007 | |
NanoInk's High-Throughput Dip Pen Nanolithography |
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| (Nanowerk News) In our recent Spotlight on nanoparticle printing – Gutenberg's grandchildren in nanotechnology labs – we wrote that "...for automated patterning of particles, existing methods are either slow (e.g., dip-pen lithography) or require prefabricated patterns on the target substrate...". This statement of course completely ignored the advanced and fast Dip Pen Nanolithography technology developed at NanoInk, Inc. | |
| Two recent papers by Chad Mirkin at Northwestern University describe the success in applying this massively parallel nanopatterning technology – "Massively Parallel Dip–Pen Nanolithography with 55000-Pen Two-Dimensional Arrays" in Angewandte Chemie International and "Massively Parallel Dip-Pen Nanolithography of Heterogeneous Supported Phospholipid Multilayer Patterns" in Small. | |
| At NanoInk, a great deal of their recent Dip Pen Nanolithography development has centered around the 2D nano PrintArray™ (pdf download, 1.1 MB), which is a breakthrough technology for hugely increasing the throughput of DPN. | |
| This is a commercially available product, and makes DPN a high-throughput, flexible and versatile method for precision nanoscale pattern formation. This flexibility and versatility are several key advantages of DPN relative to the approach described in our Spotlight article. | |
| Moreover, by fabricating 55,000 tip-cantilevers across a 1 cm2 chip, NanoInk leverages the inherent versatility of DPN and demonstrates large area surface coverage, routinely achieving throughputs of 3x107 µm2 per hour (i.e., rates competing with, or even exceeding e-beam lithography.) | |
| The NanoInk system patterns sub-100 nm feature sizes with excellent uniformity (standard deviation < 16%), and with DPN’s characteristic variety of molecules. Applications include: | |
| 1) rapidly and flexibly generating nanostructures (i.e., Au, Si) via etch resist techniques; | |
| 2) chemically directed assembly and patterning templates for either biological molecules (i.e., proteins, viruses, cell adhesion complexes), or inorganics (i.e., carbon nanotubes, quantum dots); and | |
| 3) directly writing biological materials. | |
| So, while in the early days of single tip DPN patterning it was a “slow” technique, is is no longer the case. | |
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