Magnetic Lithography May Be Used for Mass Production of Bio Applications

A "bottom-up” manufacturing strategy employs the spontaneous assembly of building blocks. Weizmann Institute of Science Professor Ron Naaman  developed the bottom-up method based on magnetolithography to produce micro- and nano-structures.  In this method, a magnetic field is applied on a substrate using paramagnetic metal masks that define the spatial distribution and shape of the applied field, while magnetic nanoparticles interact with the substrate according to the field induced by the mask(s), thus resulting in a chemically patterned substrate.

Chemical patterning of surfaces for molecular-based devices or for hybrid organic-semiconductor devices involves a "bottom-up" chemical lithography approach. However, this approach has a relatively low throughput that can be overcome by very high parallelism, which may be expensive and may introduce defects reducing the yield. Various "printing" schemes of such micro-contact nanolithography have been developed that can indeed be scaled to high throughput but are usually limited to a single stage of production and involve contact with the surface, which may affect other chemical processes. The present invention overcomes these issues by using a magnetic mask which creates a pattern of spaced-apart regions of the substrate capable of interacting with magnetic particles.

Applications:

• Processing of three-dimensional features
• Bio-related applications that require reactants to be kept at controlled conditions (e.g. biotin-avidin interactions)
• Patterning the inside of tubes so as to produce sequential reactor

Advantages:

• Patterning surfaces with various molecules and with very high spatial resolution
• Provides desired high-throughput capabilities for mass production
• Does not depend on the surface topography and planarity
• Ease in producing multilayers with the same efficiency for all layers and without removing the substrate from the solution

• Does not contaminate the surface with resist and by any other way during the patterning process

The patent pending process is available for licensing from Yeda Research and Development Company Ltd under project number 1505

Yeda Research and Development Company Ltd

P.O. Box 95

Rehovot 76100,   Israel

Tel: 972-8-947-061

http://www.yedarnd.com/