Technology

NanoShrink™ is the plastic substrate material we use in order to build all of the products we design, prototype and manufacture. Plastic substrates, even corn-based biodegradable plastics, have been used in countless industrial applications due to their flexible material properties and relative material stability. Our primary NanoShrink™ substrate is made from an advanced plastic material integrated with our technologies. By taking advantage of certain critical inherent characteristics, shrinkable polystyrene, allows for the ultra-rapid direct patterning of complex, even three-dimensional, stacked polystyrene micro and nanostructures, including single and multi-layered metallized structures as well as advanced optoelectronic devices. Because of the unique characteristic of NanoShrink™ to uniformly compress during heating, complex structures can be designed at the macro-scale level that upon heating, retain the design at the micro or nano-scale.

Our patent-pending process involves printing designed and related micro-structures on a larger scale on NanoShrink and then uniformly shrinking them down to a nanoscale size. By using our technologies to “print” on a larger scale, and then “shrink” the same features down to the nano-scale, we eliminate the need for clean rooms and other highly complex robotics or tools which are needed in order to accomplish this. A micrometer is one millionth of a meter (10^-6) and a nanometer is one billionth of a meter (10^-9). Click the image to the left for a complete flow manufacturing flow chart.