Design and Fabrication of a Large Scale Electric Field Array Device for Directed Self-Assembly of Multilayer BioDerivatized Nanoparticle Materials

In earlier work, an electronic microarray device was used to carry out a bottom-up approach for the directed self-assembly of higher order 3D structures from biotin/streptavidin, DNA and enzyme derivatized nanoparticles. Structures with up to fifty layers of alternating biotin and streptavidin, DNA and enzyme nanoparticles were fabricated using a 400 site CMOS microarray system with 50 micron electrode structures. In this process, reconfigurable electric fields produced by the microarray were used to rapidly transport, concentrate and accelerate the binding of 40 and/or 200nm nanometer bio-derivatized nanoparticles to selected sites on the microarray. The nanoparticle layering process takes less than one minute per layer. The nanoparticle addressing/binding process was monitored by changes in fluorescence intensity as each nanoparticle layer was deposited. The final multilayered 3-D structures were about two microns in thickness and 50 microns in diameter. In order to make nanoparticle layered materials with macroscopic x-y dimensions (centimeter sizes), a large scale (4") silicon wafer based electronic array device has now been designed and fabricated. The overall goal is to use the large scale device to produce fmal photovoltaic/battery prototype materials composed of layered nanoparticles and conductive polymers.