The field of nanomanufacturing of electronics is potentially huge, and there are a wide range of materials such as nanoparticles, nanotubes and quantum dots, that are coming to the marketplace.

Still, there are hurdles to overcome before manufacturing becomes mainstream. It is expensive to produce these nanoscale electronics, which are largely silicon-based, and a fabrication facility can cost more than a billion dollars.

Being able to mass-produce low-cost nanoscale electronics systems would, of course, be ideal. Inkjet printing has been used, but the speed isn’t there yet. However, Northeastern University may have a solution for this.

One of four NSF funded nanomanufacturing center in the United States, the NSF Center for High-rate Nanomanufacturing (CHN) at Northeastern has developed the Nanoscale Offset Printing System (NanoOPS), a fully automated nanoscale prototype printing system. According to Northeastern, NanoOPS can print nanoscale structures and circuits down to 25 nanometers onto flexible or hard substrates up to 8 inches using conductive, semiconducting or insulating nanomaterials, and will cost and operate at a fraction of today’s nanofabrication cost.

According to Ahmed Busnaina, W.L. Smith professor and director, NSF Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center for High-rate Nanomanufacturing at Northeastern University, the nanoscale manufacturing effort originally started with a $2 million gift in 2003 from George Kostas, a 1943 alumnus of the university who funded the construction of the nanofabrication facility, including lithography and characterization.

The George J. Kostas Nanoscale Technology and Manufacturing Research Center, the primary facility for micro and nanofabrication at Northeastern University, has more than 100 users from across the university, including users from other universities and industry.

After the CHN Center received a $24.8 million, 10-year grant in 2004, the Center focused on developing manufacturing technology using nanomaterials and directed assembly processes. The Center has received more than $50 million from other agencies and industry over the last 10 years.

“The Center manufactured electronics, chemical and bio sensors, energy harvesting and storage, as well as functional materials and surfaces, “ said Busnaina. “The directed assembly-based nanomanufacturing four years ago led to the development of specially-designed Damascene templates with nanoscale features that are inked using directed assembly and are used to print structures and circuits on flexible or hard substrates.”

The work since 2004 builds on NU’s strengths in microfabrication, control of nanoscale defects in manufacturing, materials processing and sensor technology, and the NSF grant created opportunities for collaboration between the mechanical and electrical engineering, physics, chemistry, philosophy and political science departments at the university, as well as industry and partner universities – University of Massachusetts Lowell, University of New Hampshire and Michigan State University.

Busnaina said that the NSF Center has had great success in its research.

“In the last decade, the university has filed more than 75 patents (domestic and international) on behalf of our team of researchers,” he noted. “One of our larger research thrusts is focused on directed assembly and transfer of nanomaterials to create new and novel nanoscale structures and devices. This technology based on nanoscale science has led to multi-scale printing of these structures and devices.

“Commercial nanoscale electronic device manufacturing is still largely top-down, silicon-based and expensive,” Busnaina added. “In addition, few nanoscale devices manufactured today exploit the unique properties and behaviors of nanomaterials such as nanotubes, quantum dots and nano particles. Printing offers a novel approach to fabricating devices and products incorporating nanomaterials.

“Electronic printing today is used for making low-end electronics. However, these products are made using inkjet technology, which is very slow and limited to only micro scale resolution,” Busnaina said. “Our fast, scalable, room temperature and pressure manufacturing process for printing nanoscale electronics and other devices will take advantage of the superior properties of nanomaterials and cost a fraction of today’s Si–based devices. This is accomplished through the creation of a flexible, affordable, sustainable, high–rate nanoscale printing system based on directed assembly and transfer for the fabrication of electronic devices, sensors, energy and materials applications.”

Busnaina said that this spring, the CHN Center is taking some of its key discoveries to date out of the lab and into the marketplace, beginning with NanoOPS, a collaboration with a Massachusetts-based company.

“NanoOPS can be flexibly adapted to print a variety of micro- to nano-scale devices for many applications, including electronics, energy, medical and functional materials,” Busnaina said. “This one-of-a-kind, fully automated cluster tool printing system will be unveiled in September this year. The hexagonal machine is about seven feet across and has a central robotic arm that transfers the printing templates and the final products that will result from the precision multi-scale manufacturing process.”

The NanoOPS system can use a wide variety of functional nanomaterials at very low facilities and operational cost, which could spur innovation by overcoming the high cost entry barrier to the fabrication of high-end printed device. Busnaina said that while the flexible Damascene templates can be used in a roll-to-roll printing system, NanoOPS utilizes a batch process to be able to apply nanoscale registration and alignment.

“The vision is to ‘democratize’ nanomanufacturing, making it more broadly accessible to industry and entrepreneurs and unleashing a wave of creativity for nano-enabled product innovation – analogous to what the advent of the personal computer did for computing,” Busnaina said.

“We are educating the current and the next generation of leaders in nanotechnology and printed electronics. The university conducts state-of-the-art research and collaborates industry, government agencies and other universities,” Busnaina added. “Each year, we also send hundreds of students to work in industry (including electronics, medical, energy and materials fields) through Northeastern’s number one ranked cooperative education program.”

Busnaina sees great opportunities for the NanoOPS system.

“Current electronics and 3D printing using inkjet technology, used for printing low-end electronics, flexible displays, cell phone RFIDs, are slow and provide only microscale resolution,” he said. “Even with today’s slow electronic printing and lower resolution, they still offer significant savings compared to silicon electronics. For example, the cost of a printed integrated sensor-plus-digital-readout device is 1/10th to 1/100th the cost of current silicon-based systems.

“The printed electronic market is close to $50 billion this year, and is projected to reach $250 billion in 10 years,” Busnaina added. “This is based on current electronic printing capability. However, if printing can be used to print high-end electronic devices at the same price but orders of magnitude faster, we think that the market will become many times larger in the near future. NanoOPS has been shown to be capable of being orders of magnitude faster with higher resolution than current inkjet-based electronic printing and 3D printing.”