Thursday, September 13, 2007

Nanoprinting Gets Better. Again.

Nanoprinting refers to the process of laying down very small (nanoscale) particles on a substrate with precision. This type of technology is an essential precursor to building a wide range of MEMs, micro machines and other nanotechnologies at anything approaching an industrial scale. IBM has been at the forefront of this effort after the first time researchers used a scanning tunneling electron microscope to draw the IBM logo with individual gold atoms.

This particular technology has a DPI (dots per inch) resolution of around 100,000 - or can print individual dots around 60 nanometers in size. This is quite good for a printing technology even if manual techniques currently allow the manipulation of single atoms in some environments.

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