Nanorobotic Systems

Abstract

Two strategies towards the realization of nanotechnology have been presented, i.e., top-down and bottom up. The former one is mainly based on nanofabrication and includes technologies such as nano-lithography, nano-imprint, and etching. Presently, they are still 2D fabrication processes with low resolution. The later one is an assembly-based technique. At present, it includes such items as self-assembly, dip-pen lithography, and directed self-assembly. These techniques can generate regular nano patterns in large scales. To fabricate 3D complex nano devices there are still no effective ways by so far. Here we show our effort on the development of a nano laboratory, a prototype nanomanufacturing system, based on nanorobotic manipulations. In which, we take a hybrid strategy as shown in Fig. 1. In this system, nano fabrication and nano assembly can be performed in an arbitrary order to construct nano building blocks and finally nano devices. The most important feature in this system is that the products can be fed back into the system to shrink the system part by part leading to nanorobots. Property characterization can be performed in each intermediate process. Due to the nanorobotic manipulation system, dynamic measurement can be performed rather than conventional static observations.