With the advancement in microprocessors and nano-technologies, non-impact printing has transitioned from analog to digital and is migrating from monochrome to color. The digital color-printing offerings have extended from home and office up to the production-printing segment. Digital color printing technologies have continually evolved in an effort to meet the intense customer demand for lower price per page, greater reliability/image quality, and a broad range of applications. These advances could not have been made without the critical role that xerographic materials have played. Life extensions with the ability to achieve high toner transfer efficiency and clean-ability for photoreceptor and intermediate transfer belt has been an intense focus in this industry. The rapid expansion of chemical toner technologies has enabled new applications and offered new opportunities. This talk reviews the market trends in printing, the technological challenges of meeting the market requirements, and the material developments, which have supported the digital color printing advances.

We've had digital revolutions in communications and computation, but not yet fabrication. Computers control machines that make computers, but a 10-billion-dollar chip fab still uses fundamentally analog materials. Biology provides an alternative model based on programmed assembly of molecular building blocks, offering the same kind of reliability thresholds that enable digital communications and computation. I will present research on fundamentally digital fabrication technologies that merge computation with construction, and illustrate their implications in both developed and developing countries through early access to prototype tools for personal fabrication.

About that time of Nobel Prize 2000 in Chemistry for the discovery and development of conductive polymers, a group of organics called as organic semiconductors began to attract a great deal of attention for the electronic materials. Past three decades, organic electronic materials, namely “Organic Photoconductors, OPCs, achieved a great success as electrophotographic photoreceptors of copying machines and laser beam printers after many years' efforts. The deep understandings on the charge generation and transport as well as charge injection at the interface of organic layers in organic photoreceptors established the fundamentals of electronic processes in a wide range of organic materials, which are consisted of inherently insulating molecular assembly. Recently, on a flag of “Organic Electronics”, these materials are thrown into many electronic devices such as organic electroluminescent EL devices, and more recently, organic FET transistors, organic memories, and solid state organic solar cells. Especially, great efforts have been devoted to achieve paper-like displays or electronic papers, exploiting their advantages for large area, flexible devices.In this talk, the historical progresses of OPCs in past 30 years will be reviewed briefly and let us consider what we are now aiming at with organic electronic materials, which are generally said to be inferior to inorganic silicon semiconductors in their electrical properties, and find a scenario to an advanced imaging world drawn with organic electronics. If the time permits, our recently developed novel opto-electronic device combining an organic EL diode and organic photo-electrical conversion layer will be introduced.

Nanoscience by itself is to a large extent an imaging science where complex information about ultimately small pieces of matter is mapped into multi dimensional arrays. Nano-imaging goes far beyond microscopic projection images and has contributed to the evolution of mankind's scientific understanding which is continuously rolling over into technology. In this talk I will first use nano-imaging to explain some of the recent breakthroughs in nanoscience before I describe selected examples for the transfer of nano-science into nano-technology; All—of course—in the context of imaging. I will close with a rather personal outlook into future developments and long term visions.

Purpose-built ink jet printheads are now recognized as useful tools in manufacturing where precision deposition is required. Piezoelectric drop-on-demand ink jet printheads offer the critical combination of high productivity, high reliability and jetting uniformity characteristics (drop volume consistency, velocity characteristics and jet straightness) for depositing a very wide range of materials dissolved or dispersed in organic or aqueous media. For example, ink jet printheads are key components in pilot production lines that manufacture RGB PLED displays for mobile phones. Even as ink jetting has gained a presence in display and electronics manufacturing, new opportunities are appearing that require smaller drops and increased productivity. Success with many of these new applications will require both process and fluid research and engineering.This paper describes Dimatix's approach to facilitate the development of manufacturing processes for both rigid and flexible substrates and development of new functional fluids.

Interest in the application of ink jet technology for digital fabrication and manufacturing has experienced major growth in recent years. In addition to printing on packaging and manufactured goods, ink jet offers an amazingly broad range of adaptability in the areas of passive and active electronics, biomedicine, pharmacology, micro-optics, stereo-lithography and many others limited only by our imaginations. The process of adapting ink jet to an industrial application can be a mysterious and daunting task to most developers and end users. Although there are consultants to help with getting started and integrators to help implement the processes, there is often a significant body of work that needs to be completed prior to specifying production equipment. As a result, there are a growing number of general development tools to help materials developers and end users to choose the correct materials and processes for a given application. Materials selection and process optimization is paramount to the success of any ink jet project. The purpose of this paper is to explain which measurable parameters are important and how the tools used to measure these parameters can help the developer or end user obtain a reliable and repeatable result for their application.

The fabrication of electronic circuits by jet-printing can eliminate photolithography and offers the potential to reduce manufacturing cost. Techniques used to fabricate amorphous silicon and polymer semiconductor thin film transistors (TFT) by subtractive and additive jet-printed are described. TFT backplanes patterned entirely by jet-printing on glass and flexible substrates, with application to flat panel displays and x-ray imagers, are described.

It is well known that piezo inkjet technology is capable of depositing a controlled amount of fluid in a specified location very accurately. This technology renders itself well to various deposition applications. We have conducted research to apply inkjet technology to patterning devices. In order to achieve high rates of production throughput, multi-nozzle inkjet heads are needed. One of the issues with multi-nozzle heads is the drop weight variation between channels. The inkjet heads used for this research have 128 piezo-electric elements in line. An analog drive circuit, which creates a trapezoidal waveform, is connected to the common electrode of all elements. The other ends of piezo elements are connected to individual switches. The element discharges on the leading edge of the trapezoid waveform if the other end is grounded by the switch. This causes the element to shrink and pull back the meniscus at the orifice. When it is charged on the trailing edge, the element expands and pushes the meniscus out through the orifice. The discharge level, which influences drop volume, can be controlled by adjusting the duration of the grounding time of the switch. By using this method, it has been shown that the drop weight variations across the 384 nozzles (three heads) can be improved from 25-27ng±20% to 25-27ng±5%.

This paper outlines new capabilities in the arena of maskless direct writing of advanced materials for applications in thick film electronic circuits and sensors. The genesis of this capability lies in advanced concepts based on a thermal spray particle-based deposition technology which allows for printing of 3D conformal mesoscale components of metals, ceramics, composites and polymers onto a range of substrates at low substrate temperatures. The capabilities derived offer new approaches towards integrating structures with electronics and sensors.

The first part of this talk reviews recent results in the area of Electric Nanocontact Lithography while the second part will discuss the use of electrostatic forces to direct the assembly of nanomaterials.First we report on a programmable, reconfigurable, printing approach for parallel nanofabrication of three different types of structures: patterns of charge, oxide, and e-beam sensitive resist. Our approach that we refer to as Electric Nanocontact Lithography (ENL) is based on previous knowledge in the area of conducting scanning probe lithography which uses a conducting probe to electrically expose and modify a surface. ENL makes use of the same physical principles; however, instead of using a single electrical point contact, we use programmable electrical nanocontacts of different size and shape to expose a surface.In the second part we report on a novel directed self-assembly process to assemble nanoparticle based devices. Nanoparticles are considered potential building blocks for the fabrication of future devices. The use of nanoparticles and nanomaterials in general, however, requires novel assembly concepts. The concept that we present is based on electrostatic interactions. In particular we demonstrate directed self-assembly of nanoparticles onto charged surface areas (receptors) with sub 100 nm resolution. A liquidphase assembly process where electrostatic forces compete with disordering forces due to ultrasonication has been developed to assemble nanoparticles onto charged based receptors in 10 seconds. A gas-phase assembly process has been developed that uses a transparent particle assembly module to direct and monitor the assembly of nanoparticles. A process is also being developed to enable the patterning of any organic and inorganic nanomaterials with sub 100 nm resolution. First patterns of biomolecules will be presented. Currently, the electrostatically directed assembly of sub 10 nm sized proteins, 10 – 100 nm sized metal, 40 nm sized silicon nanocubes, and 30 nm – 3000 nm sized carbon nanoparticles has been accomplished. The application to nanoparticle devices will be discussed and first results on a nanoparticle transistor will be presented.