Congratulations to Massimo Mastrangeli who has the paper "Three-dimensional polymeric microtiles for optically-tracked fluidic self-assembly" published in Microelectronic Engineering. 

© 2014 EPFL

Self-assembly (SA) is a bio-inspired key coordination mechanism for swarms of intelligent agents as well as a pervasive bottom-up methodology for the fabrication of heterogeneous micro- and nanosystems. Analytical studies of SA at small scales are therefore highly relevant for many technological applications. In this paper we present an innovative design and fabrication process for three-dimensional polymeric microtiles conceived as passive vehicles to investigate the dynamics of fluidic SA at sub-millimeter scale. The microtiles are fabricated out of the superposition of two structural SU-8 layers featuring chiral copies of the same centro-symmetric pattern. They can coordinate laterally in water independently of their vertical orientation to form close-packed square lattice clusters. The microtiles embed a central marker enabling the real-time optical tracking and automated closed-loop control of their fluidic SA. The fabrication process makes use of a thick sacrificial copper layer and allows the wafer-level batch production of tens of thousands of microtiles, in line with the massively parallel nature of SA.

The above story is based on materials by Laboratoire de microsystèmes. 

Read more: http://actu.epfl.ch/

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