Nanotechnology Technique Allows Ink Jet Printing at the Nanoscale

Researchers at the University of Illinois have created a major breakthrough in creating nanostructures, and will potentially effect everything from water purification to electronics manufacture and the creation of photonic crystals.

A trio of researchers, Eric Duoss, Mariusz Twardowski and Jennifer Lewis, created the breakthrough technology which currently can create structures as small as 225 nanometers. Their goal to create structures as small as 100 nanometers. The technique permits the creation of complex 3-dimensional structures, but at the nanoscale.

The researchers' created a new family of sol-gel inks, which eliminates the need for a coagulation reservoir that is necessary in other techniques. This makes it possible to robotically place the metallic inks in complex layers on a substrate, in the open air. The technology uses a �€˜direct-write' technique dispensing the ink in a filament, using a tip just 1 micron across, or 1/100^th the size of a human hair.

Current manufacture of electronic circuits requires careful etching and deposition of ceramo-metallic substances within the etches to build microcircuits, and that technology is rapidly approaching its limits in scaling. The possibility with the sol-gel process is to directly write the circuits onto the substrate, eliminating the painstaking etching and templating process. The etching and templating process creates impurities that can cause up to one in ten of the manufactured microcircuits to be unusable and end up as trash.

One of the demonstrated uses was creating a weave of densely packed, finely shaped material, which may be suitable as a filtration substrate. Because of the level of complexity and control, the layers could be created so literally only a specifically-shaped molecule could pass through leaving ultra-pure materials on the other side.