Emerging Methods for Micro- and Nanofabrication
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Emerging Methods for Micro- and Nanofabrication
Chad A. Mirkin and John A. Rogers, Guest Editors
New methods for micro- and nanofabrication will be essential to scientific progress in many areas of biology, physics, chemistry, and materials science. They will also form enabling technologies for applications ranging from microfluidic devices to micro-optical components to molecular diagnostics to plastic electronics to nanoelectromechanical systems. In many cases, advances will be aided by the highly engineered and spectacularly successful lithographic techniques that are used for microelectronics. These methods have certain drawbacks, however, that will limit their applicability to new devices and fields of study. For example, photolithographies cannot be used with many organic and biological materials due to their chemical incompatibility with typical photoresists and developers; they cannot easily pattern features with dimensions of less than 100 nm; they require expensive capital equipment and facilities; they have difficulty forming features on curved, uneven, or rough objects; they can only directly pattern a small set of specialized, photosensitive materials; they cannot reproduce features with complex, three-dimensional (3D) shapes; and they can only pattern small areas in a single step. This situation creates a need for research into alternative patterning methods with capabilities that can complement those of photolithography and other established approaches. This issue of MRS Bulletin presents a collection of short articles on emerging techniques for micro- and nanofabrication that are designed to avoid some of these limitations. The focus is on methods whose simplicity, flexibility in patterning, and demonstrated technical strengths suggest potentially broad utility. The articles highlight low-cost techniques that are based on advanced forms of embossing, molding,
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writing, printing, and—in a final article— polishing. Many of the basic principles of these methods are, of course, not conceptually new; embossed gold coins were first produced around 600 BC, and the printing press was invented in the 15th century. Nevertheless, recent research proves that these ideas, and variants of them, can be dramatically improved and extended into the nanometer range by introducing advanced materials, chemistries, and processing techniques. The resulting methods possess truly remarkable patterning capabilities. Several of the articles presented here demonstrate the power of these new lithographic techniques, through their application to functional prototype systems that would be difficult or impossible to realize with conventional approaches. The articles are organized according to the fundamental mechanisms for pattern transfer. The first three describe techniques that rely on embossing or molding. In each of these cases, features of surface relief on a master are reproduced in a molded material that serves either as an integral part of a device or as a mask for further processing. These techniques are generall
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