Technical Program Committee

The manufacturing of silicon-based micro/nano-electro-mechanical-systems (MEMS/NEMS) today is well advanced because the devices for automotive, domestic, health-care and consumer electronics can be fabricated with methods from IC industry. Polymer-based systems have a great potential for flexible electronics and biomedical applications, but to date, the techniques to engineer functional, and often fragile, polymers into 3D are still at their beginning because a coherent fabrication platform with the right tools and processes do not yet exist. The field however starts to benefit from increased efforts in various soft and polymer materials applications. Additive manufacturing, (e.g. 3D printing) and associated processing (e.g. sintering) have already started to transform traditional industry. These approaches however are difficult to scale below a micrometer because the thermal processing is either done in bulk using furnaces or on surface using lasers. This talk will give an overview of recent achievements in advanced manufacturing at the micro/nanoscale and associated key techniques than can be applied in particular to fragile materials, where harsh process steps using charged beams and etch chemistry are harmful. I will in particular present nanostenciling, inkjet printing, capillary self-assembly and local thermal processing. Each of them may form part of the future toolbox with gentle fabrication steps for manufacturing fragile material systems. High-resolution stenciling [1] is a quite old technique, but it keeps allowing us to study new and highly localized material deposition phenomena without the need for high-energy beam exposure and etching or development steps. Examples include metallic nanostructures (< 50nm) on rigid and flexible polyimide, parylene, SU-8 and PDMS substrates for biosensors. More recently the reduced material flux through stencils in PVD allows controlling surface crystallization of molecules for organic electronic [2]. Drop-ondemand printing of functional inks is a wet additive manufacturing approach and has been also demonstrated for SU-8 [3], nanoparticle based inks with multicolor luminescent [4] and with magnetic properties [5]. Capillary assisted assembly is a particularly mild (water based) method to position loads of prefabricated nanostructures from a colloidal solution into a deterministic surface layout, with high yield and a control down to a few nanometer precision on individual position, orientation and interparticle gap [6]. Finally, local thermal processing of functional material with sub-micrometer resolution is a quite new technique based on a thermal scanning probe lithography tool. Besides creating lithography patterns in temperature sensitive resists, we used it to write patterns in temperature responsive polymers, such as topographic/fluorescence motives in supramolecular polymers [7] and into water soluble silk [8]. All these methods are part of a new mild toolbox and have in common that they permit the use of delicate materials to engineer new types of MEMS/NEMS. Upcoming target applications are (biodegradable) implantable MEMS. They are very challenging to fabricate, but if successful, they also have an enormous impact for future wearables and implantables. The paper will show the advantages and limits of each technique and will provide some guidance how they could be combined in mix-andmatch approaches with conventional methods.