Researchers have come up with a powerful new way to make 3D nanostructures at wafer scale. They call it Adaptive Meta-Lithography.
This approach builds on two-photon lithography (TPL), a well-known but usually slow 3D printing method. By using arrays of metalenses and advanced beam control, they’ve boosted speed by more than a thousand times—yet kept nanoscale resolution intact.
It’s a practical step from lab demos to real industrial 3D nanomanufacturing. That’s a big leap.
From Slow Two-Photon Lithography to Wafer-Scale Manufacturing
For a long time, two-photon lithography has been valued for its ability to create intricate 3D structures smaller than a micrometer. But it’s always been slow, since a single laser spot “writes” structures point by point.
This made large-area or high-volume production pretty much impossible. The new system, developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with Stanford University and published in Nature on Dec. 17, tackles the problem directly.
Instead of a single microscope objective, the team swapped it for tiled arrays of high–numerical-aperture metalenses. These are thousands of tiny, ultra-precise optical elements, all engineered at the nanoscale.
Metalens Arrays as Thousands of Parallel Printers
Every metalens in the array acts like its own miniature printer. Each one focuses a shared femtosecond laser into a distinct spot within the photoresist.
By splitting a single laser into over 120,000 coordinated focal points, the system can write across centimeter-scale areas in parallel. This turns TPL from a slow, point-by-point process into a massively parallel manufacturing platform.
All these focal spots are precisely coordinated, so it avoids the stitching errors that plagued earlier multi-beam 3D nanoprinting. The array writes continuous structures over wafer-scale areas with impressive fidelity and uniformity.
Nanoscale Resolution at Unprecedented Throughput
Keeping nanoscale precision while ramping up speed is tough. Here, the team achieved a minimum feature size of 113 nanometers, which is right in the sweet spot for high-end nanofabrication.
The speed is jaw-dropping: their approach delivers throughput more than 1,000 times faster than current commercial two-photon lithography tools.
Avoiding Proximity Effects with Smart Beam Spacing
Earlier attempts at parallel TPL often ran into “proximity effects.” When beams are packed too closely, they interfere and distort the structures.
This new system sidesteps that by spacing focal spots at the metalens pitch, not crowding them into a small optical field. That well-defined spacing cuts down on optical crosstalk and nonlinear interactions between beams.
It keeps resolution and pattern accuracy high, even over big areas with complex shapes. That’s a huge relief for anyone who’s struggled with distortion in the past.
Adaptive Meta-Lithography: Real-Time Control of Every Beam
The method, called Adaptive Meta-Lithography and implemented in the MetaLitho3D platform, goes way beyond simple parallelization. They use a spatial light modulator that gives real-time, individual control over each beam in the metalens array.
This adaptive control opens up exposure strategies that conventional multi-beam systems just can’t touch.
On-Demand Switching, Grayscale Features, and Stochastic Designs
With the spatial light modulator, each focal spot can be:
This extra control really boosts design freedom. In one demo, the team printed 16 different microscopic chess openings in a single run, each with its own microarchitecture.
That shows the platform can fabricate diverse structures on the same wafer, no retooling needed. Pretty wild, honestly.
Pathway to Industrial-Scale 3D Nanomanufacturing
By combining metalens-based optics with adaptive beam control, MetaLitho3D offers a credible route to low-cost, high-volume 3D nanomanufacturing. The system’s wafer-scale reach and thousand-fold speedup directly challenge the cost and throughput barriers that have kept TPL stuck in research labs.
This capability could open doors across all sorts of fields, where complex 3D structures at the micro- and nanoscale are crucial for performance. The possibilities seem pretty exciting.
Application Areas Poised for Transformation
Potential applications for Adaptive Meta-Lithography include:
This technology just picked up a 2025 R&D 100 Award. That’s a pretty clear sign it’s not just hype—people are starting to take it seriously as a way to bring 3D nanomanufacturing to actual, large-scale production.
Here is the source article for this story: Team shatters 3D nanofabrication limits with meta-optics