Slashdot Mirror
Advance on Nanotech Dip Pen - The Nano Plotter
techtrend writes "In an
article on Eurekalert,
Northwestern chemists report making
the world's smallest plotter, a device capable of drawing multiple lines of molecules -- each line only 15 nanometers or 30 molecules wide -- with such precision that only five nanometers.
They lay down a grid of lines made
of 16-mercaptohexadecanoic acid (MHA). Then
dots of octadecanethiol (ODT) are placed at pre-calculated
positions using the grid for precision positioning.
They plan to use this process to make ultrahigh density arrays
of different organic and biological material and nanostructures.
"
Whoa! Ease up there pilgrim. This is in essence a press release. They still have to mention various important aspects of this, like speed. Also this little beauty is kind of misleading "relatively inexpensive tool (an atomic force microscope)". To get an industrial application out of this you are going to have to do this process in parallel a few hundred times, this is going to be expensive.
Still, you are right and there is serious money to be made. I think that there some very interesting hurdles to be cleared. 1) The substrate (gold) is conductive and ill suited to electronics (to say the least). 2) I wonder how uniform the applied layers of "ink" are? If they are not uniform then stacking several layers on top of one another could get pretty ugly.
woof
rde groused:
One thing that grated about the article; speaking about four-colour nanolithography. When you're dealing with molecules, colour loses its meaning, as the wavelength of visible light is up to twenty-five times the width of the line being drawn. Of course, you could draw lots of lines, but that'd take a hell of a long time.
I think they're talking about the method, not the result. Four-colour lithography depends on having chemically distinct dots Real Close Together.
Another reason to think in terms of four 'colours' is the famous topological theorem.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
GuidoDKP wisely observed:
People have been predicting the death of visible-light lithography for years now, but it's so useful that people keep coming up with ways to extend its life -- I think the latest enhancement was the use of phase-shifted interference patterns to draw features with visible light that were smaller than the wavelength of the light used...
Yup, phase-shifting is the latest trick but it's been pushed about as far as it can go. (My employer uses it and little bitty polygons are what I get paid for, at least in part.) Although "visible light" is a stretch when you're talking about ultraviolet.
Spiffy ultrahigh resolution line-drawing is monumentally valuable, though, if only as a means of producing those next-generation mask sets.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Not necessarily. It's not enough to be small to be the king of lithography -- you also have to be fast. X-ray lithography can already build insanely small circuits, but the problem is that it's a single beam. Imagine how long it would take to draw 5 million transistors on 10 layers with a pencil.
For all its limitations, photolithography can do an entire layer on multiple chips all in one shot. The more transistors you add, the faster it gets relative to a beam-method of drawing.
This plotter, although it looks very cool, also looks like its still drawing lines, as opposed to exposing portions of a wafer.
People have been predicting the death of visible-light lithography for years now, but it's so useful that people keep coming up with ways to extend its life -- I think the latest enhancement was the use of phase-shifted interference patterns to draw features with visible light that were smaller than the wavelength of the light used...
I can actually put the whole book on a single piece of paper. And to think of all the years I spent actually learning.
Vidi, vici, veni. (I saw, I conquered, I came)
It it just me, or does it seem to you like Rob posts related articles like this just to see if we'd see the relationship? :^)
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This seems nice for printed 'organic circuits' and such (2D), but could it be extended to build 3D objects?
One could imagine a process where you build up a 3D object layer by layer.
-josh
Now that nanotechnology is getting into the exponential-growth part of the curve, I'm just looking forward to see the first nanodetectors:
You could use nanosensors spread along the way of capilar chromatographic tubes to monitor all the components in their way out of the column and to notice about the existence of components which get trapped into the column in order to increment the temperature. Also you could program your chromatograph to increment the temperature depending of the separation being achieved through the column.
Nanodetectors should (for their nanosize) be able to detect even smaller quantities of substances. We could instead of using a regular-sized detector use an array of nanodetectors and read from all of them in parallel so we can get rid of noice by statistical means while at the same time detecting small quantities of substances which with the regular-sized detectors just get lost into the noise or improve the acuracy of their measurement.
We could also use nano interferometer-diode arrays to scan with unprecedent acuracy and sample rate many wave lengths at the same time.Then we will need a Beowulf just to get the spectrum from each of the nano interferograms in a way real-time relative to the sample rate.
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These guys could end up buying MICROS~1 out of petty cash. From the sounds of it they've found the semiconductor fabrication Philosopher's Stone: a way to do sub-X-ray physical patterns. Right now semiconductor feature sizes are in the 120+ nanometer range and severly limited by quantum optical effects. If they can lay down a precise grid at 15 nm and use it to sharpen up the lithography, they are going to own the semiconductor industry.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
We may not all live forever, but by golly if things keep up this way, there's a distinct chance that we will.
One thing that grated about the article; speaking about four-colour nanolithography. When you're dealing with molecules, colour loses its meaning, as the wavelength of visible light is up to twenty-five times the width of the line being drawn. Of course, you could draw lots of lines, but that'd take a hell of a long time.
Is this nitpicking? I don't mean it to be; I'm just wondering why chemists would mention something that's patently irrelevent. I do think it's cool. Honest.
An excellent area for contribution is design software. Currently there are a number of excellent free molecular modeling packages: MMTK, NAMD, Moldy, NWchem. There are also several excellent display programs: RasMol, VMD, Midas, and my own feeble effort, xyz2rgb. What is still lacking is:
- Software to generate structures painlessly. Two efforts in this area are CavityStuffer by Markus Krummenacker, DiamondCAD by Chris Phoenix and John Michelsen, and some tinkering of mine.
- Some kind of wrapper that makes all this stuff easy to use. There is a commercial package called HyperChem, and the DiamondCAD folks are working on an open-source version called OpenChem.
And if you really want to go wild with this stuff, get a job at Zyvex.WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
I see people commenting on how this can make semiconductors better, or storage media better, etc...
Look at the bigger picture. Those are going to be SMALL concerns as molecular nanotechnology keeps developing. They'll be more side-effects than main purposes.
This is one of the reasons I keep checking Slashdot often - nanotechnology, assuming there aren't any barriers to it, is going to be the final industrial revolution. We'll be able to control matter like we do information, and the world is going to change in ways nobody can predict or expect. And I'm looking forward to seeing it happen in my lifetime. Heck, I'm starting to look around and see what it takes to get into the field, just because I think I'd rather help bring it around than just sit and hope.
This is the kind of thing that has incredible future ramifications. If you thought the invention of the transistor was big, you should realize that we're watching them approach a discovery that is magnitudes bigger.
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"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Second, I really just don't like the idea of tiny machines within my body, it's just a personal hangup, though, nothing more
My dad has a pacemaker. My wife has a cochlear implant. If cars and internal combustion engines weren't so universal, I might be a bit more nervous about strapping myself in within a foot or so of thousands of little explosions per minute. And think of my children! What an evil parent I must be to position them within feet of gallons of highly explosive gasoline!
Seriously, new technology often seems scary, and we have to be cautious with at first. But over time, as the risk-takers try it and it gets made safer, it becomes so universal we don't even think about it.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.