Announcements - Past inductees of l'Ordre national du Québec hitch a ride into space with the help of NRC and INRS

June 3, 2010 — Boucherville, Quebec

At a ceremony held at the Quebec National Assembly today, Julie Payette, Canadian astronaut, presented a very special object to the Premier of Quebec, Jean Charest. In appearance, It is only a tiny piece of plastic with an even tinier dot in its centre. In actual fact, this small part is an example of an exciting new technology being developed in Quebec. This tiny part, which weighs less than a tenth of a gram and which Julie Payette brought with her in her visit to the international space station last year, is actually a microscopic inscription of the names of every past inductee of the Ordre national du Québec.

This part was created with a technology called nanoimprint lithography and is the fruit of the efforts of the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) in Boucherville and the Institut national de recherches scientifique (INRS) in Varennes, Qc. These organizations were approached by the secretariat of the Ordre national du Quebec to prepare a small, lightweight item representing their member that Julie Payette could bring into space with her.

The Technology

Invented at Princeton University in the 1990s, nanoimprint lithography involves the use of hard moulds with nano-sized features to stamp identical copies in a pliable polymer. Nano imprint lithography (NIL), a way of inexpensively manufacturing miniature devices, could become a critical production process for information technology, medicine and environmental science. Manufacturing cheap, reliable miniaturized transistors and biological sensors will put Canada's industries at the international forefront of high tech industries. Canada has the critical mass of research and manufacturing expertise to develop this technology, as exemplified by the NIL team at the NRC Industrial Materials Institute (NRC-IMI) and the nanotechnology team located at the Énergie, Matériaux et Télécommunications (INRS-EMT).

INRS-EMT was responsible for the creation and etching of a miniscule mold though electron-beam lithography. NRC-IMI was responsible imprinting this mould onto a plastic base.

For more information of this technology:

• Gutenberg Press revisited: NRC's state-of-the-art "nanoimprint" facility
• Nano Imprint Lithography: A Giant Leap for Miniature Manufacturing
• Functional Nanomaterials

Possible Applications for this technology

Through a new facility located at the NRC-IMI in Boucherville, Quebec, this technology represents the heart of what is North America's first NIL prototyping centre. It will allow NRC and INRS researchers to apply NIL technology to scale up the production of Inexpensive and reliable nanostructured devices, such as miniature transistors and biosensors for use in emerging health, energy and environmental applications.

This technology isn't only a breakthrough for the semi-conductor industry; the use of NIL to accurately and inexpensively reproduce patterns on a tiny scale has many other applications in medicine, defence, environmental science, solar energy and data storage.