Dip pen Nanolithography®:: A Desktop Nanofab™ approach using high-throughput flexible nanopatterning

The ability to perform controllable nanopatterning with a broad range of inks at ambient conditions is a key aspect of the dip pen nanolithography (R) (DPN (R)) technique. The traditional ink system to demonstrate DPN is n-alkanethiols on a gold substrate, but the DPN method has found numerous other applications since. This article is meant to outline recent advances in the DPN toolkit, both in terms of research and patterning technology, and to discuss applications of DPN as a viable nanofabrication method. We will summarize new DPN developments, and introduce our concept of the Desktop Nanofab. In addition, we outline our efforts to commercialize DPN as a viable nanofabrication technique by demonstrating massively parallel nanopatterning with the 55,000 tip 2D nano PrintArray (TM). This demonstrates our ability to overcome the serial nature of DPN patterning and enable high-throughput nanofabrication.