14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists from the IBM Research laboratories in Zurich, Switzerland just announced that they developed an innovative technology that will allow the next generation of printers to use much smaller particles which will directly translate into a great printing accuracy and huge definitions, up to 100,000 dots per inch. In order to achieve such a high definition, the scientists had to come up with a technology that will allow them to precisely manipulate particles as little as 60 nanometers, which are 100 times smaller than a typical human red blood cell.
IBM's researchers worked in a team with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and they expect this new technology to find applications beyond the simple and conventional printing process as it may very well be used to make a variety of scaled down devices like medical sensors, lenses for optical chips and nanowires for computer processors. According to the news site informationweek this technology could also be used to make money impossible to counterfeit.
While the IBM developed technology is still several years from commercial availability, it already surpasses the quality mark of 1,500 dots per inch of the current printing methods and so it might be the right technology for creating nanostructures inside computer chips and processors at industrial scales. Tobias Kraus, an IBM researcher, said that the applications of this new printing technology are very broad and said that a single device using this method could be used in the production process of many applications, depending on the type of ink used. The new printing method is fundamentally different from the traditional printing where ink droplets are randomly scattered across a given area, as the IBM technology offers direct control over the place where nanoparticles are placed on the printing surface using ''directed assembly''. "In contrast to conventional inking, directed assembly does not merely fill predefined structures with randomly dispersed pigment particles, but arranges nanoparticles at positions that are defined by the geometry of a template," the paper where this new technology was first explained states.
According to one of the researchers that contributed to the development of this technology, the nano-printing is three orders of magnitude more precise than conventional printing, being well suited for producing nanowires and similar components inside computer chips because of its great accuracy. In order to demonstrate the new printing method, the IBM researchers printed Robert Fludd's 17th-century image of the sun using 20,000 gold particles, each of them measuring only 60 nanometers.