NY Times: Drawing Semiconductor Circuits, One Tiny Line at a Time

by Anne Eisenberg 9/23/04
It's like a nano glue gun. A new way from NRL and Georgia Tech to do nanolithography that uses dip pen technology on the tip of an atomic force microscope. From this article, what's new is that they can turn the writing on and off by heating and cooling the tip and having the "ink" solid at cooler temperatures... you know, like a glue gun. Their full article is Sheehan et al "Nanoscale deposition of solid inks via thermal dip pen nanolithography" Applied Physics Letters v85 n9 (30 Aug 2004): 1589-91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.1785860.

I'm not quite sure how their version differs from the one described by Bullen et al in "Design, fabrication, and characterization of thermally actuated probe arrays for dip pen nanolithography" Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems v14 n4 (Aug 2004): 264-602 http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/JMEMS.2004.828738.

A side note: Inspec has a heading for nanolithography. Cool.