Nanoscopic patterning of nonplanar surfaces

URL

http://www.nanowerk.com/spotlight/spotid=19291.php

Description

Nanoscopic patterning of nonplanar surfaces (Nanowerk Spotlight) To build microprocessors with more than one billion transistors, manufacturers use photolithography, the high-tech, nanoscale version of printing technology. But no matter how sophisticated these patterning processes have become, driven by the needs of the semiconductor industry, projection photolithography is mostly limited to flat surfaces. However, many emerging areas of micro- and nanotechnology applications, be it in optics, imaging, sensors or bioengineering, increasingly require the fabrication of microscopic and nanoscopic patterns on nonplanar surfaces. "Contact printing and imprinting methods can cope with certain curved surfaces but appear to be restricted to those having a constant magnitude of curvature and a large radius of curvature relative to the arc length at least in one dimension," Li Jia explains to Nanowerk. "We have recently demonstrated that hexagonal noncontiguously packed (HNCP) colloidal crystal