Nano/micro 3D Manufacturing

Today, there is an emerging "tectonic" between top-down, traditional manufacturing processes stemming from microelectronics, and bottom-up, additive manufacturing processes pushed to their limits in terms of size. The latter already have a small niche market, but would benefit from contributing to the considerable industrial development associated with electronics. While nanomotors can be designed chemically (cf. the Nobel Prize awarded to Jean-Pierre Sauvage), the field's application potential is more likely to come from additive manufacturing technologies. So, for example, with the need to gain in spatial resolution to reach nano/micro targets, it makes sense to exploit biphotonic light absorption principles in stereolithography, enabling volume absorption without the need to go through layer deposition during 3D printing... However, when we approach voxels (i.e. elementary volumes of matter), other specific questions can/should be taken into consideration, as potentials between voxels at very short distances can no longer be neglected. From all these elements of diverse origins, but highly sensitive to the "nano" epic (over 2,560,000 publications), much less on the general "3D printing" dynamic (over 200,000 publications), this article reports on three major classes of 3D manufacturing concerning the nano/micro 3D theme, based on :

• synthetic chemistry or biology (cf. the work of Jean-Pierre Sauvage) with "real" nanometric objects;

• origami-based nano/micro constructions;

• a top-down approach based on 3D printing processes.

These nano/micro 3D technologies, combining processes and materials, are the focus of this article, which opens with the opportunity of so-called "mixed" manufacturing, i.e. both top-down and bottom-up. For the moment, 3D manufacturing on the nano/micro scale is not at the level of top-down IC processes. In fact, with Moore's Law, IC manufacturing techniques have recently reached the quantum wall.