The electronics industry is built on silicon: the basic semiconducting substrate for microprocessors. There are certain limitations of top-down semiconductor manufacturing, which this study sought to address using a bottom-up approach, harnessing additive manufacturing.
“It’s very tough to make complicated, three-dimensional geometries with traditional photolithography techniques,” said Professor Jun Lou, a materials science expert and lead author of the Nature Materials study. “It’s also not very green because it requires a lot of chemicals and a lot of steps. And even with all that effort, some structures are impossible to make with those methods.
“In principle, we can print arbitrary 3D shapes, which could be very interesting for making exotic photonic devices. That’s what we’re trying to demonstrate.”
Lou’s laboratory used a two-photon polymerisation process and a sophisticated 3D printer to create structures with lines only several hundred nanometres...