Imec achieves wafer-scale solid-state nanopores using EUV lithography

The breakthrough was presented at this year’s IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM 2025) and represents a major step toward scalable, high-precision molecular sensing for life sciences and healthcare.

Nanopores are tiny holes just a few nanometers wide etched into silicon nitride membranes. When immersed in fluid and connected to electrodes, they allow individual molecules to pass through, generating electrical signals that can be analysed in real time. Solid-state nanopores offer robustness, tunability, and compatibility with semiconductor manufacturing, making them suitable for high-throughput sensing, in contrast to biological nanopores, which are limited by stability and integration challenges.

Imec reports that its new fabrication process produced highly uniform nanopores with diameters down to ~10 nanometers across full 300mm wafers. The team combined EUV lithography with a spacer-based etch technique to achieve nanometer-level precision and reproducibility, two longstanding obstacles in nanopore technology. Electrical characterisation and translocation experiments with DNA fragments confirmed high signal-to-noise ratios and excellent performance with biological material.

“Imec is uniquely positioned to make this leap. We can apply EUV lithography - traditionally reserved for memory and logic - to life sciences. By leveraging our lithography infrastructure, we’ve shown that solid-state nanopores can be fabricated at scale with the precision needed for molecular sensing,” said Ashesh Ray Chaudhuri, first author and R&D project manager at imec, in a press release. “This opens the door to high-throughput biosensor arrays for healthcare and beyond.”

The breakthrough could accelerate applications such as rapid diagnostics, personalised medicine, and molecular fingerprinting. Imec is now developing a modular readout system with scalable fluidics as a platform for testing application-relevant chemistry, inviting life science tool developers to explore the new system.