Nanoscale 3D Printer Now Commercially Available 127
kkleiner writes "Now the field of 3D printing has advanced so far that a company called Nanoscribe is offering one of the first commercially available 3D printers for the nanoscale. Nanoscribe's machine can produce tiny 3D printed objects that are only the width of a single human hair. Amazingly this includes 3D printed objects such as spaceships, micro needles, or even the empire state building."
Amazing technology but micro, not nano. (Score:5, Insightful)
n/t
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typical bs clickbait headline.
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so 30nm resolution is not nano scale enough for you?
Re:Amazing technology but micro, not nano. (Score:5, Informative)
> so 30nm resolution is not nano scale enough for you?
That's 3% at one micron: barely adequate for devices with minimum dimensions of one micron and up. For nanoscale devices you need one nanometer or better.
Look at the examples. They're all dimensioned in the tens to hundreds of microns.
Re:Amazing technology but micro, not nano. (Score:4, Interesting)
I get your point, but I think you and Slashdot have to come to terms with the fact that "nano" is now buzz-word compliant. It's like how "Sanitation Engineer" started making everyone an engineer.
"Nano" actually now means "small" to the press. I'm sorry it isn't technically correct, but you are going to have to get used to it.
Now, I've got some bad news to tell you about "quantum" as well...
Re:Amazing technology but micro, not nano. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Nano" actually now means "small" to the press. I'm sorry it isn't technically correct, but you are going to have to get used to it.
No we're not. I can accept this interpretation in the local rag, but Slashdot's target audience is smart people (apparently). We should be sticking to technically accurate terminology at all times.
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i'm being very serious here
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Yesterday while I was logged on there was a comment like that (without the "it's"), and the substitution of "loose" for "lose" completely changed the sentence's meaning. When I pointed it out, my comment was moderated "troll". So apparently, many of the the moderators are just as fucking retarded as way too many commenters.
Malicious modding has certainly increased over the recent years. Today a system would make sense where you could not downmod comments but you could only upvote them.
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LOL, good one.
"time", not "tome"
"dropouts", not "dropout's
"because if I want to see", not "because if wanted to see"
"I'll", not "I'l"
subject "you get mod points" in first clause doesn't match "if I want to see" in second.
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Well, I don't much of substance to add to this conversation, so I'll be pedantic instead. The possessive "dropout's" is actually correct in this case, since he's talking about comments belonging to a hypothetical dropout. And the subject "you" is correct because he's requesting others take a specified action, the reason for which is to improve his own experience while reading the comments.
Personally, I think Slashdot's mod system is about as good as you're going to get on an anonymous internet forum. Goo
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"Nano" is considered sub 100 nm in any one spatial dimension, as defined by government funding agencies.
If that happens to mean anything to you :D
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For nanoscale devices you need one nanometer or better.
Pardon my ignorance but, according to whom? My attempt to seek clarification on this wasn't very fruitful and the definitions that I found insisted that it only had to relate to scale of nanometers which this device purports to do. Is it that you want it to mean something else or am I missing something?
Re:Amazing technology but micro, not nano. (Score:5, Informative)
It's a bit of a long read, but (IMHO) one of the best sources on the matter is Engines of Creation [e-drexler.com] by Eric Drexler.
He describes the very concept of nanotechnology, defines it as well as much philosophy around it, with plenty of examples of thing that can be done once manufacturing on this scale is achieved.
Such machines do technically already exist, such as the ribosome. Once a similar machine is created that is under complete human control pragmatically, it will be a world altering event.
If you think of the process of a cell performing its work, dividing, assembling its programmed structure, and eventually creating something on the macro scale like a whale or elephant - then you are thinking on the right scale.
The 3D printer referenced in the article is not yet able to produce structures at this scale, let alone functional machines at this scale.
At best it might be one step on the path towards true nanotechnology, as smaller tools build smaller tools and so on.
Some additional material on the subject that found recently was on youtube under productive nanosystems [youtube.com]
While this is purely an artists rendering, one video I happened upon that really brings home the scale factor is their nano-factory [youtube.com] video.
This is what most people are referring to when using the term nanotechnology.
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Thank you VERY much and, obviously, I haven't read it yet but I'll push my way through it when I'm done going through my daily ritual of reading, posting, and catching up. I appreciate it more than it may seem and your well thought out answer is something I see less frequently around here so my appreciation goes up accordingly. It doesn't really totally answer my question though I guess it does indirectly? So, please correct me if I'm mistaken...
The dictionary definition of nanoscale means something related
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You're quite welcome! This has always been a fascinating subject to me, both in terms of the science around it as well as the science fictiony type day dreams it can invoke. (And appologies in advance if this reply turns into a nice long rambling on the subject)
We are well on our way to this level of technology already, and the future is looking to be too amazing for words.
The dictionary definition of nanoscale means something related to, or measured in, nanometers which, of course, could include very large objects being measured in nanometers for no other reason other than that's the unit of measurement the person chose. This definition, while fine for a layperson or a generic use dictionary, isn't adequate for academic or professional use.
Thus, either definitively or colloquially, the term "nanoscale" is more specifically, technologically or professionally, restricted to things measuring 1 nanometer or less?
Is that correct or correct enough for a laypersons vocabulary?
I actually wish there was a more definitive answer everyone could agree on to give you.
Some say 1nm or less, others say measuring in s
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Nanoscopic Scale (redirected from Nanoscale) [wikipedia.org]: The nanoscopic scale usually refers to structures with a length scale applicable to nanotechnology, usually cited as 1-100 nanometers.
Nanotechnology [wikipedia.org]: A more generalized description of nanotechnology was subsequently established by the National Nanotechnology Initiative, which defines nanotechnology as the manipulation of matter with at least one dimension sized from 1 to 100 nanometers. (emphasis mine)
What you're thinking about is probably (also from the Nanot
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As usual, I didn't read far enough down before posting. Thanks for your concise explanation; it's exactly right. I'd mod you up if I had points.
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That's what she said.
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"nice tits"???
Re: Amazing technology but micro, not nano. (Score:1)
Thank you.
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Many technologies in physics are classified as nanoscale, such as nanoparticles 100 nm. I've heard it also defined for 300 nm. Nanoscale simply means in the nm-range.
To get 1 nm resolution, you would need a "pico-scale" device.
A buggy proposition. (Score:1)
So with this printer will I be able to create nano-spy-bugs?
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Well, we've got a long way to go between printed nanoscale tchotchke and something functional, but yeah, it does seem like a big step in that direction. I've seen some rather sophisticated fully functional planetary gear assemblies and such printed all at once on a makerbot, and while it took a lot of trimming to get it working properly I suspect such a thing would be far easier and cleaner to do in a precision instrument like this, especially since (I believe) the polymerization process used means that the
Just what I wanted (Score:3, Funny)
Nano Trinkets
Save space on your shelf for more useless plastic models, combine two buzzwords at once, join the future today with nanomakerbot 2.0!
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"Look honey, it's a nano bouquet of flowers."
"What is this, a joke?!"
Re:Just what I wanted (Score:5, Funny)
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Nano Trinkets
You can make money selling trinkets. So if it can create something in the centimeter scale with nanometer details in a short space of time (hours or even minutes) then it might be interesting for making custom jewellery. That's assuming you can do iridescent colours: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_coloration [wikipedia.org]
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Just wait 'til Apple hears about it and creates the new iPod nanonano. The one that you can plug completely into your ear.
But I guess it would be hard to market to the usual Apple crowd. I mean, who'd know that they have an Apple product if it is invisible to the naked eye?
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There'll be a glowing white apple logo in your ear. Just large enough and bright enough to be noticed :)
Amazing (Score:2)
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Yeah, had to watch it twice just for the grin I got from watching it the first time. This is some serious nerdsmanship.
I'd like to know where one might use a stent 20nm. wide.
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Exactly which one of us said it isn't?
Re:Amazing (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm childish enough to find many things amazing.
Sometimes in the wee hours when the mind roams I still get a hint of the simple rush from my first experience with an interactive computer, one of the early 8-bit machines: I press a key, and a letter shows up on the screen. Very simple it is; yet all the tech, all the science underlying it, the full range of variously insightful to plodding accomplishments needed to design and build the circuits and instructions still fascinates. I try to appreciate and accord value to well-designed, well-made items that are shepherded through the constraints of materials, cost to build, and market vagaries, amongst others - be it a nail clippers or a CPU.
My knowledge being small, my understanding smaller, my ignorance vast as Universe, there's plenty for amazement.
Am I amazed enough for you, or will you slough me off as simply dotty?
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I feel pretty much the same way. People take so much for granted, Even cutlery,,, how long would it take for an Iron Age blacksmith to craft a single cutlery set? Chariot wheels are actually quite complex. A composite bow? Contrast that with a modern electronic item, or any of a huge range of custom=designed materials. The insight required to modify genomes to produce somewhat predictable outcomes?
It's staggering. I think anyone who misses the significance of all of this is seriously lacking in imagination.
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Even cutlery,,, how long would it take for an Iron Age blacksmith to craft a single cutlery set?
The fact that most cutlery nowadays is rolled stainless steel still kinda blows me away. When I was a kid (40-odd years ago) stamped mild-steel flatware coated with peeling chrome was commonplace. Today it's almost unheard of, and you can get a decent stainless steel set for $100.
Back in the day we used sterling silver flatware for fancy occasions, which you do still see now and then, but it is so much inferior to stainless that it's extremely rare (and honestly building spoons designed to stir near-boili
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Chip fabs are expensive mainly because there isn't all that many of them. There are no economies of scale. The companies that make machines for fabs have to pay for large R&D efforts while sometimes selling on the order of 10 units per year. If there was a serious market for desktop-sized fabs, you could certainly get them for reasonable sums. A somewhat compactly designed but still entirely possible 1um process for BiCMOS on small (say 50mm) wafers could occupy the circumscribed volume of a couple larg
"The Empire State Building" (Score:2)
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Well, they never specified which unit the nano- was prefixed to.
A nanoparsec would be about 30,000km, a nanolightyear around 10,000km, and a nano-AU would be around 150m. By any of those, the ESB would be "nano-scale" (or below).
Perfect! (Score:2, Funny)
It's perfect for those moments, when somebody starts complaining about stuff that you may not care about at all, because you can print the world's smallest violin and you can print the worlds smallest hands to play the smallest violin as well!
Not molecular printing unfortunately (Score:2)
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With the mention of the word 'nano', I was hoping for an advance in molecular/atomic printing. I'd love the ability to mass produce objects (even just cubes) of various materials.
Careful with those - De Beers [wikipedia.org] might strongly object to mass producing cubic structures from carbon atoms.
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considering blood wont be shed for them I would say thats a far better idea.
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Considering how I strongly object to some of their practices, you may rest assured that what I give about it is not even close to 50% of the waste product after metabolizing food.
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I dare say the value of such objects will sharply decline if their production becomes cheap.
Re:Not molecular printing unfortunately (Score:4, Insightful)
Price may, value depends on usefulness.
Not everything that has a high value has a price tag attached to it. No matter what our market tries to blind you with.
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The products hawked by DeBeers are a quite nice counter example of something that has a high price tag but a very low value.
And before someone butts in with "but ... hardest material", realize that you can get the same kind of material from synthetic means, they just ain't so shiny.
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This model only prints violins.
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If I worked there, that'd definitely be the first thing I'd print. After that it would have to be something porn related.
I guess that's why I don't work there.
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Your best results would probably be using graphene, but good luck pirnting that :)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/13/usa-desalination-idUSL1N0C0DG520130313 [reuters.com]
Getting Closer (Score:3)
Oh we are getting closer to being able to cheaply print vinyl records!
My deam of custom 45s in a classic home jukebox inches closer and closer.
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You can already buy a vinyl recorder. Why print something that was designed to be cut?
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Cost and convenience. The “proper gear” with expensive cutter heads that suffer from limited use wear and tear - for what, to me, would ultimately be a novelty. . .
The trial and error alone in getting the right "sound" would see many coasters and placemats quickly created.
Re:Getting Closer (Score:4, Funny)
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You say that like this 30nm 3D printer will be cheap.
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I say this like one day it will be cheap. ...As I said, dreams getting closer, not actually realised
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My deam of custom 45s in a classic home jukebox inches closer and closer.
Mine too - Kimber, S&W, Norinco, Colt Custom Shop... Oh, sorry, wrong 45's...
A nanoscale printer sound really awesome (Score:5, Funny)
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No worries there, you know how printers are today. They're cheap, just the refills cost an arm and a leg.
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Atom Ant Figurines (Score:1)
This could be a boon to semiconductors and MEMS (Score:5, Interesting)
This printer would work extremely well for MEMS devices since the complex structures such sensors can now just be printed rather than deposited and etched over and over again in a microchip fab.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=NGFhc8R_uO4 [youtube.com]
Even if you can magically make chemicals not react while they patiently wait to be positioned atom by atom, how the hell will you prevent household dust and vibrations from messing up the accuracy? Do we have any idea of what this machine needs as physical support? Like a giant cement floor or vibration-damping structure?
You got that in your living room?
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Who said anything about a living room?
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Could this thing (reasonably) print a mechanical (Score:2)
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Nonsense. E-beam and ion beam lithography are already standard. They're a lot easier to control and use than mask-based lithography and work in a normal lab. They just are no good for mass production, and they are expensive because there isn't a lot of demand for them.
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Well that and they are serial and thus slow. (Yes I know about the parralell methods for both E-beam and Ion beam [also ion-beam litho, not direct write maybe for making nano-imprint-masks]) So the reason they are expensive (they aren't: E-beam is way cheap for the resolution, its just you'd never want to wait for even a single layer of a real device with E-beam litho on a production scale) is that you need lots of them to get anywhere near the throughput you get with photo-lithography.
Sure this technique m
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No "and". They aren't good for mass production because they are slow; that's pretty much the only disadvantage they have.
The technique hasn't been tuned as much as standard lithography. And you can get smaller features with ion beam lithography already. People may just not be able to make light-based lithography work at smaller feature sizes and we'll be for
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depends on what you mean by smaller features. With 30keV Ga ions on Si the effective range is on the order of 27nm which basically limits your z resolution to something around 30nm, You can do a bit better with lateral resolution, FEI claims something on the range to sub 10s of nm, but I'm really having difficulty with the choice of the term lithography.
Lithography usually refers to some sort of masking procedure but the real advantage of ion beam is that you can do deposition and milling. You can do simila
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Sorry, I went all internet tough guy back there...
I should clarify what I meant.
1st: E-beam lithography as I know it; with an E-beam resist is pretty much the creme of the crop if you want ultra high resolution. It is also a very old technique IE they were looking at it to replace photo-lithography as far back as the '80s but there are difficulties with making a bright electron beam to do the lithography in a parallel manner. Therefore its been used serially with a beam rastering the resist to make the desi
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Or we simply need to get the cost down to the point that they become as ubiquitous as printers (and soon 3D printers). With millions of such devices around, it wouldn't matter if it took it a few days to produce a complex chip.
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except that E-beam lithography is in effect lithography, the following steps are harder and require lots of infrastructure.
Here is a typical process for getting a single layer into a chip.
Step 1: Clean the substrate of any organics.
Step 2: Apply resist (usually using a spin on process)
Step 3: Expose resist (E-beam -- Photolithography it doesn't matter). The hard part here is exposing in the correct places.
Step 4: Develop resist, usually wet chemistry which will remove or leave only the areas exposed in the
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Don't be so hung up on "lithography"; I didn't actually use the term myself. And, in fact, I think large scale, low-cost VLSI manufacturing will likely be based on a combination of self-assembly and AFM technologies, which people already know how to parallelize.
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This thing can only print certain materials so I'm not sure it works for electronics. And the resolution is 30 nm according to the Technology World article. The press release doesn't say anything about the resolution though.
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30nm would be awesome for prototypes and low-count manufacture. Hell, 32nm was the limit of photolithography not too many years ago. Not that it'd be as easily done as said, but if you could build 30nm or even 60nm node one-off chips in an industrial design office or university lab that'd be plenty small enough.
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I'm not sure how printing MEMs devices serially is going to be faster than parallel mass production on 12" or 18" silicon wafers. Printing them is analogous to laboriously machining a part in a CNC mill compared to stamping in a forge. Photolithography and etching are pretty fast processes. Well, etching can be sl
30nm? (Score:2)
Can I print a chip with this? Chris Gammell will buy one if it can.
Fly on the wall... (Score:2)
Board to engineer: We're excited to see the first demonstration of our new 3D printer! Let's see what you've got...
Engineer to board: I've got good news and not so good news. The good news is the printer is working great, and I've brought several printed objects for you to take a look at.
Board member: What's the bad news? Production costs are higher than estimated?
Engineer: Well, not really. We have a scale problem. Unfortunately, the intern that exported the CAD blueprints to the machinists wasn't used t
The empire state building? (Score:1)
What is this? An empire state building for ants? How can we be expected to teach children to learn how to read... if they can't even fit inside the building?
This needs to be... at least three times bigger!
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Spaceship (Score:1)
When reading the summary I thought - it would take a very long while to print a spaceship nano particle at a time (or micro particle as it turns out).
Only on reading the article did it clarify its a 'model' spaceship.
The SI needs to reclaim its prefixes (Score:2)
micro is 10 to the minus 6 (1 millionth)
nano is 10 to the minus 9 (1 billionth)
So a nanoscale printer should have a resolution of 1 nanometre
A metre is the standard unit of length
A meter is a device for measuring something eg thermometer
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0.003" (Score:1)
Three lousy thou? I could hit sizes of one thou (0.001") easily when I was first learning to machine (manually).
The real point (Score:3)
Okay, that's great. Now scale it. (Score:3)
Re:Okay, that's great. Now scale it. (Score:5, Insightful)
You're barking up the wrong tree. Getting to this precision isn't the problem with "normal scale" prototyping. That could be accomplished long before the advent of 3D printing, and high precision prototypes are not really the area where 3D printers are used. At least not the consumer grade models that most people know about.
3D printing was and is about is to make the whole deal cheap. To give everyone access to the ability to produce plastic prototypes that doesn't involve a process that resembles playing with very expensive Play-Doh.
This thing is a completely different beast altogether. From the looks of it alone you can easily tell that "cheap" wasn't really one of the corner stones this project rested on. Building really tiny things was.
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I would suggest that the single biggest reason that 3d printers aren't used in the area of high precision prototypes may only be because their resolution hasn't been good enough.
It's too bad this isn't likely to be particular cheap, like contemporary home 3d printing is.
One application that I can easily imagine high precision consumer 3d printing being used for includes creating very precisely detailed miniatures (typically where the fineness of detail serves some aesthetic interest, particularly when
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There are high quality, high detail and high precision 3D printing options very available. They're far from the hobbyist 3D printers that you may have at home, though. There isn't just one way to 3D print, just like with normal printers there are various ways how material is formed, and all those methods have their advantages and shortcomings. Extrusion (the currently probably most common hobbyist method) is fairly cheap but it's quite inaccurate and has troubles with overhanging structures. GMP allows any
I'll believe it when I see it... (Score:4, Funny)
...Doh!!!
Military applications (Score:2)
Great... (Score:1)
tchotkes that will set off your hay fever. Can't wait.