Polymer-pen lithography

Polymer pen lithography is a further development of this parallelized printing in which the cantilever is dispensed with. In what is effectively a form of pCP, pyramidal PDMS tips are fabricated by casting polymer onto a suitable silicon master. The tips are inked with adsorbates and brought into contact with the surface. The printing may be controlled using a piezo-actuated scanner, very much in analogy with the operation of an AFM. 

Xie Z, Chen C, Zhou X, Gao T, Liu D, Miao Q, Zheng Z (2014) Massively parallel patterning of complex 2D and 3D functional polymer brushes by polymer pen lithography. ACS Appl Mater Interfaces 6(15) 11955—11964... 

A few variations to the original dip-pen lithography have been applied in separate studies. The results have fully demonstrated the potential of this technique [28,29]. For instance, Lim and Mirkin reported a patterning method in which the AFM tip was coated with a water-soluble CP by thermal evaporation or dip-coating and the charged water-soluble polymer was transported from the AFM tip to the pretreated oppositely charged substrate by electrostatic interactions (Figure 10.13 and 10.14) [28]. 

Despite the intractability of conducting polymers, a variety of methods have been developed for the fabrication of conducting polymer thin films and nanopatterns [254,255]. Nanoscale PPy thin films or patterns were fabricated through several techniques such as surfactant and block copolymer templat-ing [256,257], microphase separation and molecular mask [258], dip-pen lithography [259], and so forth [260]. 

Fig. 2 Atomic force microscopy (AFM) friction images and schematic illustrations of the patterning processes of a microcontact printed SAMs (mercaptoethanol dots in oc-tadecanethiol matrix, scale bar 10 xm) b patterned molecular printboards fabricated by supramolecular dip-pen nanolithography (DPN) (reprinted with permission from [92] Copyright 2004. WUey VCH) e locally hydrolyzed tert-butyl acrylate-terminated polymer film on oxidized silicon (soft lithography scale bar 3 xm) (Feng CL, Vancso GJ, SchOn-herr H, manuscript submitted to Langmuir) d photopatterned bilayer of diacetylene lipid (scale bar 10 xm). Reprinted in part with permission from [93], copyright (1999), American Chemical Society...

Although many processes are available or have been proposed for fabricating polymer-based micro- and nanoanalytical devices, including microtransfer, microcontact print-ing, ° dip pen nanolithography, nanoimprint lithography, hot emboss-... 

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