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IBM may be onto something with nanoprinting technique |
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Sep 13, 2007 at 06:22 AM |
No sooner had I posted a blog yesterday about Kovio, an emerging printed semiconductor company and its mysterious nanoparticle technology, than the researchers at Big Blue announced a breakthrough in what they call "nanoprinting." The method, developed at the company's site in Switzerland and presented in the September issue of Nature Nanotechnology, can achieve nanolithography-like patterns and densities using a self-assembly technique combined with aspects of old-school print techniques.
The research team managed to print particles down to 60 nm, using single-particle resolution to create both simple lines and complex particulate arrangements.
If you convert the nanobuggers resolution to dots per inch, or dpi---a metric we in the publishing business are well familiar with--the IBMers' methodology can finagle 100,000 dpi, a mere 98,500 dots more per inch than what current offset printing lays down. Not constrained by the need for a rigid substrate, the technique can print on a variety of flexible materials for a wide range of electronics, biomedical, and other potential applications.
Here's what IBM's Tobias Kraus says in the PR: "In traditional gravure printing, a doctor blade is used to fill the recessed features of a printing plate with ink, in which pigment particles are randomly dispersed. In our high-resolution printing, a directed self-assembly process controls the arrangement of nanoparticles on the printing plate or template. The entire assembly is then printed onto a target surface, whereby the particle positions are precisely retained at a resolution that is three orders of magnitude higher than in conventional printing."
Even if the technology advances rapidly, IBM's breakthrough won't be ready for volume manufacturing prime-time for a few years. It also still has a ways to go to match the best-of-class resolution of leading-edge semiconductor linewidths, let alone gate lengths. But when it or other competing printing techniques that truly achieve nanoscale patterning on a par with advanced litho push out of R&D into production, the consequences of such powerful, low-cost, high-resolution techniques will be truly profound.
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