Engineered Self-assembly From Nano to Milli Scales

Karl F. Böhringer
Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195-2500, USA

Abstract

Self-assembly is the autonomous and spontaneous organization of components into patterns or structures. Self-assembly is ubiquitous in nature, e.g. in the growth of crystals and organisms, but also at macroscopic scales – it is nature’s prevalent paradigm for manufacturing. Self-assembly also provides the basis for important new industrial manufacturing techniques, especially for components at the milli, micro, and nano scales: their small sizes and large numbers scale unfavorably for common serial techniques but favorably for a new, massively parallel approach. We believe that self-assembling systems will be able to create complex, heterogeneous, non-periodic, three-dimensional
devices in massively parallel production processes. Hence, our research investigates the scientific and engineering foundations of self-assembly processes for integrated micro/nanoelectromechanical systems (MEMS/NEMS).