Photonics West – the world's leading photonics, laser, and biomedical optics conference – took place this week in San Francisco. During the event, a German company called Nanoscribe GmbH presented the world's fastest 3D printer of micro- and nanostructures.
Nanoscribe's latest printer allows the smallest three-dimensional objects – often smaller than
the width of a human hair – to be manufactured with minimum time consumption and maximum resolution, using a novel laser lithography method. Replacing conventional electronics with optical circuits of higher performance, its polymer waveguides can reach a data transfer rate of more than 5 terabits (Tb) per second. Printing speed is increased by a factor of about 100, with jobs that previously took several hours now being possible in a matter of minutes.
This huge increase in speed is possible thanks to a galvo mirror system, a technology that is also applied in laser shows and the scanning units of CD and DVD drives. Reflecting a laser beam off the rotating galvo mirrors facilitates rapid and accurate laser focus positioning. This video is shown in real-time:
This ultra-precise fabrication allows feature sizes ranging down to just 100 nanometres (nm). At present, the total area of the scanning field is limited to a few hundred micrometres (μm) due to the optical properties of the focusing objective. Just as floor tiles must be joined precisely, the respective scanning fields must be connected seamlessly and accurately. However, by using a patented autofocus technique and high-precision positioning stages, areas can be extended almost arbitrarily by a so-called stitching process.
Martin Hermatschweiler, the managing director of Nanoscribe GmbH: "We are revolutionising 3D printing on the micrometre scale. Precision and speed are achieved by the industrially established galvo technology. Our product benefits from more than a decade of experience in photonics, a key technology of the 21st century."
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