Nanomanufacturing Technologies: Advances and Opportunities

Nanotechnologies have attracted wide interests and evolved rapidly in the past two decades. They are expected to have transformative impacts on the health, environment, energy, and many other aspects of our society. However, their applications so far are severely hindered by the lack of matured and affordable manufacturing technologies to realize systems in large scales where millions of nanoscale elements are assembled to form commercial products. In this paper, we give a brief overview of the current status of different nanomanufacturing technologies, including top-down approaches such as scanning probe lithography, focused beam, soft and nanoimprint lithography, as well as bottom-up approaches such as vapor deposition and dip-pen nanolithography. Those methods were developed for materials such as carbon, silicon, and polymers in various industries. We analyze the future opportunities and challenges of these technologies.