Nanoengineering for Manufacturing Productivity

Additive Nanomanufacturing

As an additive nanomanufacturing technique, EHD printing exhibits great potential to fabricate flexible electronic and photonic devices with high resolution, good scalability, and low cost. By combining EHD printing with other additive nanomanufacturing techniques such as self-assembly, we have demonstrated that structures with single-particle resolution can be achieved in a cost-effective way.

ehd printing

Illustration of EHD Printing

Probe-based Nanomanufacturing

AFM lithography is a resist-based lithography technique that can achieve high resolution. In contrast with EBL and photolithography that utilise high energy electron beam or photons, it uses AFM tips to image and pattern nanostructures in ambient conditions. This greatly reduces the manufacturing cost. Our goal here is to make this method universal by achieving more complex nanoscale structures not only on silicon-based substrates but also on flexible substrates.

Water-based Nanomanufacturing

With the increasing demand for flexible and wearable technologies, manufacturing techniques to construct advanced devices on flexible substrates are becoming of high importance. Our group focuses on developing effective and sustainable methods to fabricate flexible & functional devices. We achieve it by avoiding the use of organic solvents throughout the fabrication and figuring out ways such as water-only lithography.

Pick-and-place

Nanofabrication techniques are always at the core of creating interesting and useful devices at the nanoscale. In our group, we explore pick-and-place techniques at the nanoscale which opens up many possibilities to create unique devices that could previously only be tested in simulations. Unlike macroscale picking and placing of objects, nano-manipulation has the added complexity of dealing with surface adhesion and chemistry which makes this area of study so challenging yet rewarding and impactful.

pick and place np

Nanoparticles on an AFM tip

pick and place nw

Transferring of a nanowire

Fiber-to-chip Coupling

One of the persistent challenges in photonics is the coupling of light produced by a laser source and guided in a fibreoptic cable from or into a nanoscale device, mainly because of the large mode mismatch between them. A decent coupler should offer low insertion/coupling loss while maintaining a wide bandwidth. Therefore, we aim to advance/develop such techniques to get the optimum performance out of our photonic devices.

edge coupling

Edge Couplers

grating coupler

An apodized grating coupler