Micro-contact printing or soft lithography is analogous to printing ink with a rubber stamp.

Many structures can be formed using the most common, rapid prototyping technology, soft lithography with polydimethylsiloxane(PDMS).

Since its inception many methods of soft lithography have been explored.

According to Rogers and Nuzzo (2005), development of soft lithography expanded rapidly from 1995 to 2005.

Especially used for electronics, it has recently become a standard in biomaterials engineering and for fundamental research on cellular biology by mean of soft lithography.

The best known patents cover soft lithography, Professor Whitesides's method of depositing extremely thin layers of material onto a surface in carefully controlled patterns.

Perhaps even more intriguing, soft lithography can work on highly irregular or rounded surfaces where photolithography is all but impossible.

His work has made important contributions to soft lithography - a low cost alternative to conventional photo-lithography for patterning circuits on microchips.

He is best known for his work in the areas of NMR spectroscopy, organometallic chemistry, molecular self-assembly, soft lithography, microfabrication, microfluidics, and nanotechnology.

In Bio-MEMS, soft lithography is used extensively for microfluidics in both organic and inorganic contexts.