From micro- to nanofabrication with soft materials

Soft materials are Þnding applications in areas ranging from microßuidic device technology to nanofabrication. We review recent work in these areas, discuss the motivation for device fabrication with soft materials, and describe applications of soft materials. In particular, we discuss active microßuidic devices for cell sorting and biochemical assays, replication-molded optics with subdiffraction limit features, and nanometer-scale resonators and wires formed from single-molecule DNA templates as examples of how the special properties of soft materials address outstand-ing problems in device fabrication. During the height of the silicon microelec-tronics revolution, Kurt Peterson wrote a seminal paper entitled “Silicon as a Mechan-ical Material ” (1). Twenty years later, the resounding success of microelectromechani-cal systems (MEMS) continues to reverberat