Soft lithography for micro- and nanoscale patterning

By D. Qin, Younan Xia, George M. Whitesides. Nature Protocols, 2010

2,189 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This protocol provides an introduction to soft lithography—a collection of techniques based on printing, molding and embossing with an elastomeric stamp. Soft lithography provides access to three-dimensional and curved structures, tolerates a wide variety of materials, generates well-defined and controllable surface chemistries, and is generally compatible with biological applications. It is also low in cost, experimentally convenient and has emerged as a technology useful for a number of applications that include cell biology, microfluidics, lab-on-a-chip, microelectromechanical systems and flexible electronics/photonics. As examples, here we focus on three of the commonly used soft lithographic techniques: (i) microcontact printing of alkanethiols and proteins on gold-coated and glass substrates; (ii) replica molding for fabrication of microfluidic devices in poly(dimethyl siloxane), and of nanostructures in polyurethane or epoxy; and (iii) solvent-assisted micromolding of nanostructures in poly(methyl methacrylate).

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1dbe78f483bfa62fbfd35aa3fffc2297bb7208ab

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Citations in the corpus

Soft robotics: Technologies and systems pushing the boundaries of robot abilities (2016, background): “Among many, such techniques include micromolding (91), soft lithography (92), and multimaterial embedded 3D printing (93).”
A review on the progress of polymer nanostructures with modulated morphologies and properties, using nanoporous AAO templates (2016, background): “They found that the dynamic behavior of PDMS was strongly affected by the confinement and followed a two-phase model: one phase consisted of free bulk-like chains and the other phase was conformed by confined polymers.”
Development Trends and Perspectives of Future Sensors and MEMS/NEMS (2019, methodology): “Along with the development of this technology, soft lithography using an elastomeric stamp was developed with its methods about the printing, molding, and embossing [33,34].”
Optoelectronically innervated soft prosthetic hand via stretchable optical waveguides (2016, background): “Soft lithography ensures that all structures of the initial mold are replicated in the final waveguide without any loss of detail, including surface roughness (40).”