Nanopatterning Soluble Multifunctional Materials by Unconventional Wet Lithography

Abstract Molecular multifunctional materials have potential applications in many fields of technology, such as electronics, optics and optoelectronics, information storage, sensing, and energy conversion and storage. These materials are designed exhibit enhanced properties, and at the same time are endowed with functional groups that control their interactions, and hence self‐organization, into a variety of supramolecular architectures. Since most of the multifunctional materials are soluble, lithographic methods suitable for solutions are attracting increasing interest for the manufacturing of the new materials and their applications. The aim of this paper is to highlight some of the recent advances of solution‐based fabrication of multifunctional materials. We explain and examine the principles, processes, materials, and limitations of this class of patterning techniques, which we term unconventional wet lithographies (UWLs). We describe their ability to yield patterns and structures whose feature sizes range from nanometers to micrometers. In the following sections, we focus our attention on micromolding in capillaries, lithographically controlled wetting, and grid‐assisted deposition, the most used methods demonstrated to lead to fully operating devices.