Nanoelectromechanical systems for biology: Where to go from now?

Abstract

Despite the fact that bio-nano-electromechanical systems (bioNEMS) are considered as the ultimate mechanical systems for complex biosensing, one still has to demonstrate that highly sensitive nanomechanical elements can be readily mass-produced in terms of both fabrication and biofunctionalization technologies. In this paper, we discuss a fundamental change of technological paradigm based on nanoprinting-techniques which implementation will successfully address all the bioNEMS-related issues at once. The choice of the nanoprinting-based techniques as a generic way to both fabricating (by transfer-printing) and functionalizing (by nano-contact printing) ultra-dense arrays of NEMS (thousands per cm2) could lead to easy-to implement, flexible recipes for front-end and back-end processing while avoiding a long series of technological steps which most of the times dramatically impacts the yield, and subsequently the cost of fabrication.