The current microelectronics manufacturing method is expensive, slow and energy and resource intensive.

But a Northeastern University professor has patented a new process and printer that not only can manufacture advanced electronics and chips more efficiently and cheaply, it can make them at the nanoscale.

“I thought that there must be an easier way to do this, there must be a cheaper way to do this,” says Ahmed A. Busnaina, the William Lincoln Smith professor and a distinguished university professor at Northeastern University. “We started, basically, with very simple physical chemistry with a very simple approach.”