Join ARCS OC on this field trip to UCI to attend the Distinctive Voices series Lecture

Science at Play!

Presented by Michelle Khine, University of California, Irvine

Wednesday, May 8th, 2019 • 7:00 PM-8:00 PM 
The Beckman Center, NAS, UCI campus

The challenge of micro- and nano-fabrication lies in the difficulties and costs associated with patterning at such high resolution. To make such promising technology—which could enable pervasive health monitoring and disease detection/surveillance—more accessible and pervasive, there is a critical need to develop a manufacturing approach such that prototypes as well as complete manufactured devices cost only pennies. To accomplish this, instead of relying on traditional fabrication techniques largely inherited from the semiconductor industry, we have developed a radically different approach. Leveraging the inherent heat-induced relaxation of pre-stressed thermoplastic sheets—commodity shrink-wrap film—we pattern in a variety of ways at the large scale and achieve desired structures by controlled shrinking down to 5% of the original, patterned sizes. The entire process takes only seconds yet enables us to ‘beat’ the limit inherent to traditional ‘top-down’ manufacturing approaches. With these tunable shape memory polymers, compatible with roll-to-roll as well as lithographic processing, we can robustly integrate various materials from thin metal films to various nanomaterials in order to achieve extremely high surface area, densified, and high aspect ratio nanostructures directly into our microsystems for conformal wearable sensors as well as other applications.