Platform for 3D Manufacturing

What are you proposing to do?We want to establish a 3D nanofabrication platform for massively parallel manufacturing of designed functional nanoscale materials/devices.How is it done today?Current top-down approaches such as nano-lithography are inherently planar and suffer from limited throughput and restricted material options. 3D printing struggles to achieve high resolution and offers a limited material choice and throughput. Molecular beam epitaxy is exceedingly slow and works with a limited material repertoire.What is new in your approach?We will be reverse engineering self-assembled architectures to create the desired function, and decoupling the assembly process from the nature of the component. We will also encode functional nanocomponents and encode a connectivity of nanoscale modules.If you are successful, what difference will it make?We can create optically active materials which are required to bridge nanoscale-photonic systems. We could enable negative refraction index material, metamaterials, modular nanoreactors and factories, and optical computing.Cost and timeline?We expect it to take $10M over 4 years.What are the midterm and final “exams” to check for success?In the midterm, we only need to see a prototype structure. For the final exam, we would have a coarse grained model block with a computational design workflow.