BOXBORO, MA -- A state-of-the-art semiconductor fab can cost up to $15 billion, putting it out of reach by all but the very largest players.

One inventor says a new manufacturing process could slash cost that to under $100 million.

Ahmed A. Busnaina, Ph.D., says nanoscale offset printing could be a game-changer for producing electronic sensors. Sales of IoT hardware are forecast to reach $500 billion by 2024, and sensors, which are predominant in IoT, will grow more than 250% over roughly the same period to reach $64.3 billion.

Meanwhile, he added while keynoting the IMAPS New England conference on May 3, while printed electronics are a $40 billion a year industry, printed sensors are less than $300 million currently. And while printed electronics have been around since the early 1990s, technology is finally reaching the point where it could move away from silicon-based (semiconductor) manufacturing processes to simpler, and cheaper printed electronics processes.

One drawback slowing printed sensor development has been its inability to produce sufficiently small line widths and at high throughput. Busnaina's lab at the NSF Nano Center of Northeastern University had developed a novel way to overcome that, he says.

"The goal is to do 20 micron (or smaller) line widths, and be able to interconnect multilayers through the board," as opposed to simply printing in the X axis on the top of a substrate). Furthermore, Busnaina said, the ideal system would be "orders of magnitude faster" for printing. Nanoscale offset printing's (NanoOPS) advantages include the process is additive (no waste) and parallel (it prints macro and nano lines in one shot, so it’s faster than sequential).

In addition to the high throughput, NanoOPS accepts flex or rigid substrates; is template based; consumes low amounts of energy; and is material independent (prints on organic or inorganic; insulating materials and so on). And it is capable of the 20 micron line width goal.

Perhaps most important, he adds, there's a "huge cost advantage" to printing -- 1/10 to 1/100 of a silicon-based sensor, depending on the sophistication of the sensor. (The process is shown in a video on YouTube.)

The ink used is make of nanoparticles, nanotubes, and polymers that are attracted to the printing template using directed assembly.

Prof. Busnaina, who spent 13 years as a consultant to IBM and another two advising the president and CEO of Samsung on nanoelectronics, says the NanoOPS process could slash fab costs to a fraction of their current price tag, to as little as 1/15 of the capex outlay. 

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