MEMS FOR UNLOCKING THE SECRETS OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEMEllis Meng
University of Southern California, USA
The complexity of the mammalian nervous system has inspired many tools for deciphering neural activities down to the cellular scale. Extracellular electrodes realized using silicon MEMS have already achieved access to vast quantities of neural information. This talk discusses new advances in polymer MEMS neurotechnologies that will drive the next revolution in our understanding of in the nervous system and form the basis of new therapies.
DNA FOR DIGITAL DATA STORAGEBill Peck
Twist Bioscience, USA
The recent explosion of digital data generation has spawned broad interest in new more efficient ways of storing digital information. One promising method is to encode digital information into Nature's Storage Media, DNA. Using DNA as a digital storage media was anticipated 60 years ago in Feynman's famous paper. Since that prophetic work, techniques to artificially synthesize DNA have been developed to a point where we can demonstrate utility and identify technology gaps. We will discuss the gaps that need to be addressed to make DNA the choice for future large-scale data storage.
ELECTRONIC SKINS FOR ROBOTICS AND WEARABLESTakao Someya
University of Tokyo, JAPAN
The human skin is a large-area, multi-point, multi-modal, stretchable sensor, which has inspired the development of an electronic skin for robots to simultaneously detect pressure and thermal distributions. By improving its conformability, the application of electronic skin has expanded from robots to human body such that an ultrathin semiconductor membrane can be directly laminated onto the skin. Such intimate and conformal integration of electronics with the human skin, namely, smart skin, allows for the continuous monitoring of health conditions. The ultimate goal of the smart skin is to non-invasively measure human activities under natural conditions, which would enable electronic skins and the human skin to interactively reinforce each other. In this talk, I will review recent progresses of stretchable thin-film electronics for applications to robotics and wearables. Furthermore, the issues and the future prospect of smart skins will be addressed.
3D LASER NANOPRINTINGMartin Wegener
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), GERMANY
In this talk, I will give an introduction into laser based 3D printing on the micro- and nanoscale, describe the state-of-the-art, and compare it to other 3D additive manufacturing approaches. I will emphasize two future challenges: (i) Scalable and faster 3D printing and (ii) multi-material 3D printing, including "4D" architectures. Application examples include micro-optical components, metamaterials, scaffolds for biological cell culture, and 3D fluorescent security features.