annual Plan of the ENIAC Joint Undertaking34, reflecting that self-assembly is a research area with applications envisaged beyond the fiveyear time frame. Scalable self-assembly combined with soft lithography has been shown to produce several cm square of ordered nanoparticles in monolayers as well as in patterns35. This has been taken to the limit of nanoparticle printing with single nanoparticle resolution in well specified sites36.
nanoICT
discussed among academic, industrialist and government agencies32.
Fig. 4 > Optical micrographs of roll-to-roll nanoimprinted, transparent 3 cm x 3 cm size backlight device. The device consist more than 60 000 optical binary grating elements. The quality of elements influence directly the light diffraction of the device and therefore excellent edge quality is needed (T. Mäkelä et al, VTT Microsystems and Nanoelectronics, to be published)./
Fig. 5 > An example of a double-sided printed OLED structure with feature sizes below 1 μm consisting of a high efficiency LED with substrate patterned on both sides by roll-to-roll and NIL The device exhibited 65% external efficiency. (V Lambertini, T Mäkelä and C Gourgon, unpublished data)./
Applications: Low-cost manufacturing, displays, optical sensors, sensing, fluidics, solar cells, photovoltaics, diffractive and plasmonic nanostructures, touch-panel screens. Self-assembly Self-assembly techniques are researched as alternative to electron-beam lithography and interference lithography. They have been identified as a research need in the ENIAC SRA 200733 but were absent in the Multi-
Fig. 6 > Illustration of the experimental setup developed for controlled convective and capillary assembly of particles on surfaces. The assembly is performed by dragging the liquid meniscus of a colloidal suspension droplet between a fixed slide and a moving substrate actuated by a stepper motor. The temperature of the substrate is controlled by a Peltier element. (after ref 35 © American Chemical Society 2007)./
The use of silicon patterned substrates to engineer the capillary flow has resulted in the self assembly of 3-dimensional photonic crystals in a process which is fully scalable and compatible with silicon fabrication37. Efforts towards developing methodology as a measure of quantitative order have been demonstrated38. Recent development in self-assembly include directed self-assembly of di-block copolymers in order to reach the sub 20 nm size regime. The FP7 project LAMAND39 investigates the use of this nanofabrication approach for scalable high resolution nanopatterning for ICT. Applications: heterogeneous integration, opto-biotechnology, environmental sensor,
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