Nanoscale dispensing of liquids through cantilevered probes

Nanoscale dispensing is a novel technique to deposit material and create structures at dimensions of 100 nm and below. It has great flexibility in feature shape and choice of deposited material. Due to its potential low cost and lack of time consuming steps, it represents an interesting complementary tool to standard lithographic processes. The key feature of nanodispensing is deposition of liquids through an apertured scanning force microscopy probe tip. In the first experiments, liquid is manually loaded into a hollow pyramidal probe tip. Upon contact of the tip and the substrate, liquid at the end of the tip is transferred to the substrate surface. Moving the sample during contact allows to write features with sizes that can be as small as 100 nm and below, largely dependent on the aperture diameter. This approach is novel, and has recently been demonstrated in our laboratory for the first time, with feature sizes still well above 1 mum. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.