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LOS ANGELES -- As nanomachines move beyond just prototypes, a potential industry of microscopic mass production awaits its own Henry Ford to make it a reality.
In anticipation of this demand, researchers at a nanotech lab at UCLA are mass-producing billions of customizable microparticles using a machine normally found in the microchip fabrication industry. Lead by Dr. Thomas Mason, the team has created microscale letters to illustrate the possibilities of this new process.
"The idea is to make a powerful statement about a new class of materials that exist. Solid particles that have human-designed shapes. We can design millions of different kinds of shapes, highly uniform, highly precise," explains Mason.
Mason's ultimate goal is to quickly create large quantities of parts for complicated nanomachines. These parts would include nanogears, nanoengines and other small-scale parts that are currently created one at a time in an assembly line fashion. Click through the gallery to go behind the scenes of microfabrication.
Left: Billions of microscale letters on a silicon wafer reflect light like a diffraction grating.
Zoomed in, one can see the microscale alphabet soup and the potential for information and codes embedded in various substances. Though each letter is a few microns across, this new mass production technique will be able to produce objects on the scale of nanometers with upgraded equipment.
This is the unglamorous beginning of nanoletter production.
The white box at left is the spin coater, which applies the nanoletter polymer on a silicon wafer (see first slide), like the kind used to make microprocessors. First, a drop of the polymer is placed on a silicon wafer. Then the wafer spins and the centrifugal force spreads the liquid evenly over the silicon.
The polymer is photosensitive and hardens under exposure to ultraviolet light. In the next steps, the UV light takes on the shape of the desired micro-object and exposes that exact design in the polymer. The unexposed polymer washes away, leaving the hardened shapes, in this case letters, behind -- almost like cutting cookies from a sheet of dough.
This lamp enclosure emits strong UV light. The light bounces through a series of mirrors into the machine that exposes the nanoletters, called a stepper (shown in next slide).
UCLA nanotech professor Dr. Thomas G. Mason explains the basic operation of the stepper -- so named because it steps, or repeats, an image multiple times over the silicon wafer. The machine prints a microscopic version of the image at each step by shining UV light onto the photosensitive polymer, like the way positive film is exposed.
Inside the stepper sits a 200-pound lens encased in stainless steel (center) which very accurately imprints a shrunken image onto the polymer. This lens is ground to an extremely high level of precision to avoid introducing errors into the image being exposed.
A robotic assembly inside the stepper grabs the silicon wafers and exposes it one section at a time. It exposes an entire wafer in roughly one minute, creating billions of micro-objects.
The stepper rests on a pneumatic dampening system (black cylinders with blue tops) to virtually eliminate vibrations. Just as you don’t want your camera shaking when you take a photo, you don’t want your stepper shaking when you make billions of nanoletters.
A positioning platform (middle, illuminated in pink) precisely moves the wafers between exposures.
This scrapped stepper system sits outside the clean room. It's now used for spare parts, just like that old car on cinder blocks in your front yard.
Mason and Kun Zhao don gloves before entering the clean room where the Ultratech XLS stepper resides. Dust particles can ruin the nano and microscale patterns the stepper images on the silicon substrate.
Batman is just a gadget geek at heart. A very, very wealthy gadget geek. But until recently, he's employed some tech that's, well, pretty unbelievable. Ice skates popping out of boots? Come on!
Not in The Dark Knight. Director Christopher Nolan's version of Batman is an almost-believable early adopter, with every high tech gizmo at his disposal firmly grounded in real-world technology. To get the lowdown on the five coolest pieces of gear from the film, we sat down with the film's Oscar-nominated production designer, Nathan Crowley, to find out where the inspiration for each Bat-gadget came from.
After the Batmobile (aka the Tumbler) is destroyed, Batman is forced to continue his pursuit of the Joker on this machine-gunning, shoulder-navigated, gimbals-sporting two-wheeler. This is a vehicle made for multitasking, allowing Batman to fire its guns, steer hands-free and maneuver hard without much risk of a wipeout. Says Crowley, "If you go over on its side, it keeps you upright."
Real-World Counterpart: Dodge Tomahawk The Bat-Pod most closely resembles the V-10, 500-horsepower Dodge Tomahawk concept vehicle. But designwise, Crowley says, the 'Pod draws most of its inspiration from the general design of the Tumbler itself. Just compare the front tires on the two vehicles: They're the same. "We didn't want it to be anything more than raw function, and that's why it looks like it does," says Crowley.
Past Batmen have had a hard time turning their heads (paging Michael Keaton), because the cowl was a solid piece of rubber attached to the suit itself. Not this time. Able to move independently of the suit, Batman's new mask now allows him to crane his head up and down and side-to-side with ease.
Real-World Counterpart: Motorcycle Helmet When racing a Hayabusa at 180 mph, visibility and flexibility are everything. That's why the independently pivoting design of a motorcycle helmet and racing suit served as the chief point of reference for Batman's cowl design.
The new Batsuit is designed with mobility in mind. Batman can now turn his head up and down and side-to-side.
"We really wanted to change up the suit," Crowley admits. Adding more protection in addition to more flexibility (and less nipple) than previous versions, the armor worn by Batman comprises hundreds of interlocking plates that move independently of each other. The result? Batman is more mobile, can do more stunts, and can kick a lot more ass.
Real-World Counterpart: Samurai Armor The interlocking plates of the Batsuit -- while made of modern materials like Nomex, titanium and Kevlar -- share their design with ancient armor once worn by Samurai warriors in feudal Japan. These lightweight, lacquered get-ups were strong, contained hundreds of interlocking pieces, and allowed their wearers a full range of motion.
When Batman has to apprehend a villain in Hong Kong, he utilizes a weapon that fires sticky, orange bomb pellets that adhere to glass. The gun is collapsible, breaking down to small pieces that Batman can store on his belt. "It's more like a piece of origami than anything else," says Crowley.
Real-World Counterpart: Collapsible Rifle The sticky-bomb gun owes its DNA to any collapsible weapon. Just have a look at the M-40 rifle (.pdf) favored by Marine Corps snipers: The gun can be broken down into multiple parts for easy transportation. The explosive, sticky ammo, though? That's 100 percent pure Crowley.
Since the Joker does not have a lair or a base, Batman must track the constantly mobile madman through the streets of Gotham. To do this he uses a cowl-mounted sonar device that triangulates the baddies' cellphone signals and then renders the sound of their communication into a 3-D visual map.
Real-World Counterparts: Lidar and Sonar Usually utilizing lasers, a Lidar system measures reflected light to find the range, dimensions and other properties of far-off objects. Sonar, of course, is the technology of bouncing sound waves off faraway objects to get a realistic picture of where those objects are. Combine the two, and you've got the 3-D system Batman uses to hunt his quarry.