NSF Award
1100872
This grant provides funding for basic studies into fundamental techniques for enabling a generalized microchip assembly process. The research strategy is to learn from industrial xerography printing, which electrostatically assembles ~108 charge toner particles on a sheet of paper in <1 sec for under 1 cent/page. Viewed as an assembly technology, xerography is a million times faster than state of the art robotic pick and place. This work will explore, through modeling and experimentation, how best to place charge on generic microchips and then use dynamic electric fields to orient and transport the chips into position. <br/><br/>If successful, the results of this research could guide the future design of a generalized manufacturing tool for bridging the gap between optimized nanoscale devices and meso/macroscopic systems. The long term vision is to enable a "printer" where the "ink" is high performance prefabricated active devices and the "paper image output" is a large area functional system, not possible with existing manufacturing techniques. Ink examples include nanotube/nanowire based sensors, other functional devices with nano composition, low noise amplifiers, light sources, high speed circuit chips with submicron features or ceramic blocks. Functional system examples include nano based sensor arrays, high performance flexible electronics, phased arrays (metamaterials), new thermoelectric composites, or smart paper.
