Engineering

Fabrication

Microfluidics

Materials science

Layer (electronics)

Scalability

3D printing

Computer science

Photoresist

Manufacturing engineering

Alternative medicine

Laser

Physics

Nanotechnology

Database

3d printed

Optics

Lithography

Soft lithography

Composite material

Medicine

Nanoscopic scale

Quantum dot

Optoelectronics

Pathology

Science Advances

Three-dimensional (3D) laser micro- and nanoprinting has become a versatile, reliable, and commercially available technology for the preparation of complex 3D architectures for diverse applications. However, the vast majority of structures published so far have been composed of only a single constituent material. Here, we present a system based on a microfluidic chamber integrated into a state-of-the-art laser lithography apparatus. This system is scalable in terms of the number of materials and eliminates the need to go back and forth between the lithography instrument and the chemistry room numerous times, with tedious realignment steps in between. As an application, we present 3D deterministic microstructured security features requiring seven different liquids: a nonfluorescent photoresist as backbone, two photoresists containing different fluorescent quantum dots, two photoresists with different fluorescent dyes, and two developers. Our integrated microfluidic 3D printing system opens the door to truly multimaterial 3D additive manufacturing on the micro- and nanoscale.

Multimaterial 3D laser microprinting using an integrated microfluidic system