Summary

There is a renewed sense of urgency to innovate manufacturing technology in the US. The report by the President's Executive Commission on Advanced Science and Technology and the recent announcement by the Obama administration of a new, $500M Initiative on Advanced Manufacturing have underscored this interest. Advanced manufacturing technologies from nano- to milli-scales will play a major part in this effort, with self-assembly, as a massively parallel, bottom-up manufacturing approach, at its very core. Self-assembly is commonly defined as the spontaneous and autonomous organization of components into patterns or structures. Self-assembly typically proceeds by energy minimization: the central engineering challenge is the design of components that achieve the desired assembly state when an energy minimum is reached. At the nano-scale, self-assembled monolayers and atomic layer deposition are prime examples of engineered self-assembly that are transitioning into industrial manufacturing processes; at micro- and milli-scales, surface-tension driven alignment of electronic components can be employed for the heterogeneous integration of microsystems.
The conference on Foundations of Nanoscience – Self-assembled Architectures and Devices (FNANO) was established in 2004 and has attracted 150 – 200 attendees every year. We will use FNANO as the backdrop for this workshop on Manufacturing with Self-assembly.

Participants

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers from two different communities, with the goal to explore common interests and complementary skill sets towards the development of new micro/nano manufacturing technologies. These communities are: (1) The MEMS/NEMS community that has developed since the 1980’s around the development of integrated microtransducers, with close ties to the semiconductor industry. (2) The FNANO attendees, who represent a unique, interdisciplinary group of scientists covering theoretical and experimental aspects of chemistry, biochemistry, physics, computer science, mathematics, and various engineering disciplines. Of course, we welcome attendees from other fields, too!

Schedule

The workshop will take place all day Friday, April 19, 2013 at the Snowbird Cliff Lodge.