NanoComputer

Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a new technique for creating high-quality semiconductor thin films at the atomic scale – meaning the films are only one atom thick. The technique can be used to create these thin films on a large scale, sufficient to coat wafers that are two inches wide, or larger.

“This could be used to scale current semiconductor technologies down to the atomic scale – lasers, light-emitting diodes (LEDs), computer chips, anything,” says Dr. Linyou Cao, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at NC State and senior author of a paper on the work. “People have been talking about this concept for a long time, but it wasn’t possible. With this discovery, I think it’s possible.”
“The key to our success is the development of a new growth mechanism, a self-limiting growth,” Cao says. The researchers can precisely control the thickness of the MoS2 layer by controlling the partial pressure and vapor pressure in the furnace. Partial pressure is the tendency of atoms or molecules suspended in the air to condense into a solid and settle onto the substrate. Vapor pressure is the tendency of solid atoms or molecules on the substrate to vaporize and rise into the air.

Source: http://news.ncsu.edu/

Researchers are developing a new type of semiconductor technology for future computers and electronics based on “two-dimensional nanocrystals” layered in sheets less than a nanometer thick that could replace today’s transistors. New technologies will be needed to allow the semiconductor industry to continue advances in computer performance driven by the ability to create ever-smaller transistors.

“We are going to reach the fundamental limits of silicon-based CMOS technology very soon, and that means novel materials must be found in order to continue scaling,” said Saptarshi Das, who has completed a doctoral degree, working with Joerg Appenzeller, a professor and scientific director of nanoelectronics at Purdue‘s Birck Nanotechnology Center. “I don’t think silicon can be replaced by a single material, but probably different materials will co-exist in a hybrid technology.”

Source: http://www.purdue.edu/

A team of IBM researchers working on a U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)-funded program have found a way to transmit massive amounts of data with unprecedentedly low power consumption. Scientists predict that the supercomputers of the future—so-called “exascale computers“—will enable them to model the global climate, run molecular-level simulations of entire cells, design nanostructures, and more.

“We envision machines reaching the exascale mark around 2020, but a great deal of research must be done to make this possible,” says Jonathan E. Proesel, a research staff member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. To reach that mark, researchers must develop a way to quickly move massive amounts of data within the supercomputer while keeping power consumption in check.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/

While the demand for ever-smaller electronic devices has spurred the miniaturization of a variety of technologies, one area has lagged behind in this downsizing revolution: energy-storage units, such as batteries and capacitors. Now, Richard Kaner, a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA and a professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and Maher El-Kady, a graduate student in Kaner‘s laboratory, may have changed the game.The UCLA researchers have developed a groundbreaking technique that uses a DVD burner to fabricate micro-scale graphene-based supercapacitors — devices that can charge and discharge a hundred to a thousand times faster than standard batteries. These micro-supercapacitors, made from a one-atom–thick layer of graphitic carbon, can be easily manufactured and readily integrated into small devices such as next-generation pacemakers.The new cost-effective fabrication method, described in a study published this week in the journal Nature Communications, holds promise for the mass production of these supercapacitors, which have the potential to transform electronics .

“The integration of energy-storage units with electronic circuits is challenging and often limits the miniaturization of the entire system,” said Kaner,. “This is because the necessary energy-storage components scale down poorly in size and are not well suited to the planar geometries of most integrated fabrication processes.” “Traditional methods for the fabrication of micro-supercapacitors involve labor-intensive lithographic techniques that have proven difficult for building cost-effective devices, thus limiting their commercial application,” El-Kady said. “Instead, we used a consumer-grade LightScribe DVD burner to produce graphene micro-supercapacitors over large areas at a fraction of the cost of traditional devices. Using this technique, we have been able to produce more than 100 micro-supercapacitors on a single disc in less than 30 minutes, using inexpensive materials.”
Source: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/

Researchers at Rochester Institute of Technology, international semiconductor consortium SEMATECH and Texas State University have demonstrated that use of new methods and materials for building integrated circuits can reduce power—extending battery life to 10 times longer for mobile applications compared to conventional transistors.

“The tunneling field effect transistors have not yet demonstrated a sufficiently large drive current to make it a practical replacement for current transistor technology,” says Sean Rommel, an associate professor of electrical and microelectronic engineering. “But this work conclusively established the largest tunneling current ever experimentally demonstrated”, providing a practical basis for low-voltage transistor technologies.

Source: http://www.rit.edu/news/

According to the University of Delaware‘s Professor Bingqing Wei, stretchable electronics are the future of mobile electronics, leading giants such as IBM, Sony and Nokia to incorporate the technology into their products.
Beyond traditional electronics, potential stretchable applications include biomedical, wearable, portable and sensory devices, such as cyber skin for robotic devices and implantable electronics. All established classes of high-performance electronics exploit single-crystal inorganic materials, such as silicon or gallium arsenide, in forms (i.e., semiconductor wafers) that are fundamentally rigid and planar. The human body is, by contrast, soft and curvilinear. This mismatch in properties hinders the development of devices capable of intimate, conformal integration with biological tissues, for applications ranging from basic measurement of electrophysiological signals, to delivery of advanced therapies, to establishment of human-machine interfaces. One envisioned solution involves the use of organic electronic materials, whose flexible properties have generated interest in them for potential use in paper-like displays, solar cell, and other types of consumer electronic devices.

“Advances in soft and stretchable substrates and elastomeric materials have given rise to an entirely new field,” says Wei, a mechanical engineering professor at UD.
But even if scientists can engineer stretchable electronics — what about their energy source?
“Rechargeable and stretchable energy storage devices, also known as supercapacitors, are urgently needed to complement advances currently being made in flexible electronics,” explains Wei.
Source: http://rogers.matse.illinois.edu

Ever since the Wright brothers, engineers have been working to develop bigger and better flying machines that maximize lift while minimizing drag. There has always been a need to efficiently carry more people and more cargo. And so the science and engineering of getting large aircraft off the ground is very well understood.
But what about flight at a small scale? Say the scale of a dragonfly, a bird or a bat?
Hui Hu, an Iowa State University associate professor of aerospace engineering, said there hasn’t been a need to understand the airflow, the eddies and the spinning vortices created by flapping wings and so there haven’t been many engineering studies of small-scale flight. But that’s changing. The U.S. Air Force, for example, is interested in insect-sized nano-air vehicles or bird-sized micro-air vehicles. The vehicles could fly microphones, cameras, sensors, transmitters and even tiny weapons right through a terrorist’s doorway. See former post on http://www.nanocomputer.com/?p=242

So how do you design a little flier that’s fast and agile as a house fly? Hu says a good place to start is nature itself. These kinds of physics and aerodynamics lessons – and many more – need to be learned before engineers can design effective nano- and micro-scale vehicles.
Source: http://www.news.iastate.edu/

Silicon’s crown is under threat: The semiconductor’s days as the king of microchips for computers and smart devices could be numbered, thanks to the development of the smallest transistor ever to be built from a rival material, indium gallium arsenide.

A cross-section transmission electron micrograph of the fabricated transistor. The central inverted V is the gate. The two molybdenum contacts on either side are the source and drain of the transistor. The channel is the indium gallium arsenide light color layer under the source, drain and gate.

The compound transistor, built by a team in MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories, performs well despite being just 22 nanometers (billionths of a meter) in length. This makes it a promising candidate to eventually replace silicon in computing devices, says co-developer Jesús del Alamo, the Donner Professor of Science in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), who built the transistor with EECS graduate student Jianqian Lin and Dimitri Antoniadis, the Ray and Maria Stata Professor of Electrical Engineering.
Source: http://web.mit.edu/

Researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have created more than 100 three-dimensional (3D) nanostructures using DNA building blocks that function like Lego® bricks — a major advance from the two-dimensional (2D) structures the same team built a few months ago. In effect, the advance means researchers just went from being able to build a flat wall of Legos®, to building a house. The new method, featured as a cover research article in the 30 November issue of Science, is the next step toward using DNA nanotechnologies for more sophisticated applications than ever possible before, such as “smart” medical devices that target drugs selectively to disease sites, programmable imaging probes, templates for precisely arranging inorganic materials in the manufacturing of next generation computer circuits, and more.

Wyss Institute researchers have created more than 100 three-dimensional nanostructures using DNA building blocks that function like Lego® bricks. This video illustrates how DNA is used to build these structures. Watch video…

The DNA-brick technique capitalizes on the ability of DNA strands to selectively attach to other strands, thanks to the underlying “recipe” of DNA base pairs. This animation shows how the DNA strands self-assemble to build a structure. View animation…

Source: http://wyss.harvard.edu/

A team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania has shown that nanoscale particles, or nanocrystals, of the semiconductor cadmium selenide can be “printed” or “coated” on flexible plastics to form high-performance electronics. Electronic circuits are typically integrated in rigid silicon wafers, but flexibility opens up a wide range of applications. In a world where electronics are becoming more pervasive, flexibility is a highly desirable trait, but finding materials with the right mix of performance and manufacturing cost remains a challenge.

Professor Cherie Kagan, from the School of Arts and Sciences explains: ’“We have a performance benchmark in amorphous silicon, which is the material that runs the display in your laptop, among other devices,” Kagan said. “Here, we show that these cadmium selenide nanocrystal devices can move electrons 22 times faster than in amorphous silicon.”
The research was led by David Kim, a doctoral student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science; Yuming Lai, a doctoral student in the Engineering School’s Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering; and Professor Cherie Kagan, who has appointments in both departments as well as in the School of Arts and Sciences’ . Benjamin Diroll, a doctoral student in chemistry, and Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor Christopher Murray of Materials Science and of Chemistry also collaborated on the research. The work was published in the journal Nature Communications.
Source: http://www.upenn.edu/

A Northwestern University research team has found a way to manufacture single laser devices that are the size of a virus particle and that operate at room temperature. These plasmonic nanolasers could be readily integrated into silicon-based photonic devices, all-optical circuits and nanoscale biosensors. Reducing the size of photonic and electronic elements is critical for ultra-fast data processing and ultra-dense information storage. The miniaturization of a key, workhorse instrument — the laser — is no exception. The results are published in the journal Nano Letters.

“Coherent light sources at the nanometer scale are important not only for exploring phenomena in small dimensions but also for realizing optical devices with sizes that can beat the diffraction limit of light,” said Teri Odom , a nanotechnology expert who led the research.

Source: http://www.northwestern.edu/

Researchers at the Carnegie Institution have discovered a new efficient way to pump heat using crystals. The crystals can pump or extract heat, even on the nanoscale, so they could be used on computer chips to prevent overheating or even meltdown, which is currently a major limit to higher computer speeds. The research is published in the Physical Review Letters.Ronald Cohen, staff scientist at Carnegie’s Geophysical Laboratory and Maimon Rose, originally a high school intern now at the University of Chicago carried out the research. They performed simulations on ferroelectric crystals—materials that have electrical polarization in the absence of an electric field. The electrical polarization can be reversed by applying an external electrical field.

“The electrocaloric effect pumps heat through changing temperature by way of an applied electric field,” explained Cohen. “The effect has been known since the 1930s, but has not been exploited because people were using materials with high transition temperatures. We found that the effect is larger if the ambient temperature is well above the transition temperature, so low transition temperature materials are preferred.”
Source: http://carnegiescience.edu/

The fabrication of many objects, machines, and devices around us rely on the controlled deformation of metals by industrial processes such as bending, shearing, and stamping. Is this technology transferrable to nanoscale? Can we build similarly complex devices and machines with very small dimensions? Scientists from Aalto University in Finland and the University of Washington in the US have just demonstrated this to be possible. By combining ion processing and nanolithography they have managed to create complex three-dimensional structures at nanoscale. The discovery follows from a quest for understanding the irregular folding of metallic thin films after being processed by reactive ion etching.

We were puzzled by the strong-width-dependent curvatures in the metallic strips. Usually initially-strained bilayer metals do not curl up this way, explains Khattiya Chalapat from Aalto University.
Source: http://www.aalto.fi/en/current/news/view/2012-10-18/

Researchers at Rice University are designing transparent, two-terminal, three-dimensional computer memories on flexible sheets that show promise for electronics and sophisticated heads-up displays or quant glass.The technique based on the switching properties of silicon oxide, a breakthrough discovery by Rice in 2008, was reported today in the online journal Nature Communications.The Rice team led by chemist James Tour and physicist Douglas Natelson is making highly transparent, nonvolatile resistive memory devices based on the revelation that silicon oxide itself can be a switch At 5 namometer, it shows promise to extend Moore’s Law, which predicted computer circuitry will double in power every two years. Current state-of-the-art electronics are made with 22 nm circuits.

The research by Tour, Rice’s T.T. and W.F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science; lead author Jun Yao, a former graduate student at Rice and now a post-doctoral researcher at Harvard; Jian Lin, a Rice postdoctoral researcher, and their colleagues details memories that are 95 percent transparent, made of silicon oxide and crossbar graphene terminals on flexible plastic.The Rice lab is making its devices with a working yield of about 80 percent, “which is pretty good for a non-industrial lab,” Tour said. “When you get these ideas into industries’ hands, they really sharpen it up from there.”
Source: http://news.rice.edu/2012/10/02/visionary-transparent-memory-a-step-closer-to-reality/

Sometimes even batteries can use a boost of energy, according to the focus of a Kansas State University graduate student’s research. Steven Arnold Klankowski, a doctoral candidate in chemistry, La Crescent, Minn., is working under Jun Li, professor of chemistry, to develop new materials that could be used in future lithium-ion batteries. The materials look to improve the energy storage capacity of batteries so that laptops, cellphones, electric cars and other mobile devices will last longer between charges. Additionally, lithium-ion batteries that can store energy and deliver power more rapidly will be a more viable alternative power source for vehicles and machines powered by alternative energy, Klankowski said. For example, solar- and wind-powered technologies could switch to the battery in the evening when there is a lack of wind or sunlight to produce energy.

"The battery market is moving very fast these days as everyone is trying to get an advantage for their electric vehicles and cellphones," said Klankowski, who also has a background in materials engineering. "As our devices get smarter, so must our methods to supply greater amounts of portable electrical energy to power these devices."

Source: http://www.k-state.edu/media/newsreleases/
sept12/lithiumbattery92712.html

Eric Furst is intent on advancing the science of the super-small, and not even Earth’s gravity can hold him back. From his office in University of Delaware’s Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Furst has directed astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in some of the first nanoscience experiments in space. Furst’s focus is colloids — otherwise known as emulsions or suspensions — materials that are part solid and part liquid. You know them as paint, glue, egg whites, gels, milk, even blood. He is exploring colloids at the nanoscale to reveal their physics. Ultimately, his goal is to identify how nano-“building blocks” of various shapes and chemistries can be directed to “self-assemble” into specific structures with desired functions. Such “smart materials” could endow a robot, for example, with the dexterity to be able to pick up an item as fragile as an egg.

With the basic principles of directed self-assembly decoded on the ISS, his team is creating materials from more complex nano-building blocks — doublets he calls “smashed spheres,” and titania ellipsoids, shaped like rice, but 10,000 times smaller. With these infinitesimal components, Furst’s lab already has created novel functional nanomaterials for use in optical communication systems and as thermal coatings, with the support of the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.
“The sky’s the limit!” Furst says.
Source: http://www.udel.edu/researchmagazine/issue/vol3_no2/nano_world.html

Researchers at Tampere University of Technology, Finland, will explore paths toward a completely new way of designing and making logic circuits that consume no current and can be written and read with light. The key idea behind the project is the so-called quantum dot cellular automaton (QCA). In QCAs, pieces of semiconductor so small that single electronic charges can be measured and manipulated are arranged into domino like cells. Like dominos, these cells can be arranged so that the position of the charges in one cell affects the position of the charges in the next cell, which allows making logical circuits out of these “quantum dominos”. But, no charge flows from one cell to the next, i.e. no current. This, plus the extremely small size of QCAs, means that they could be used to make electronic circuits at densities and speeds not possible now. However, realisation of the dots and cells and making electrical connections to them has been a huge challenge.
Professors Donald Lupo from Department of Electronics, Mircea Guina and Tapio Niemi from Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC), and Nikolai Tkachenko and Helge Lemmetyinen from Department of Chemistry and Bioengineering, want to investigate a completely new approach. They want to attach tailor-made molecules, optical nanoantennas, to the quantum dots, which can inject a charge into a dot or enable charge transfer between the dots when light of the right wavelength shines on them.
Laser light is emitted from the end of a cadmium sulfide nanowire.

Simultaneously, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have made an important advance in this frontier of photonics, fashioning the first all-optical photonic switch out of cadmium sulfide nanowires. Moreover, they combined these photonic switches into a logic gate, a fundamental component of computer chips that process information. The research was conducted by associate professor Ritesh Agarwal and graduate student Brian Piccione of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science. Post-doctoral fellows Chang-Hee Cho and Lambert van Vugt, also of the Materials Science Department, contributed to the study.
Source: http://www.tut.fi/en/current/electronics-without-current-finnish-team-to-research-the-future-of-nanoelectronics-p032013c2
AND
http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/news/penn-researchers-make-first-all-optical-nanowire-switch

If you venture into a coffee shop in the coming months and see someone with a pair of futuristic glasses that look like a prop from Star Trek, don’t worry. It’s probably just a Google employee testing the company’s new augmented reality glasses. Instead, Glass looks like only the headband of a pair of glasses — the part that hooks on your ears and lies along your eyebrow line — with a small, transparent block positioned above and to the right of your right eye. That, of course, is a screen, and the Google Glass is actually a fairly full-blown computer.

click and enjoy the video demonstration

Or maybe like a smartphone that you never have to take out of your pocket. Inside the right earpiece — that is, the horizontal support that goes over your ear — Google has packed memory, a processor, a camera, speaker and microphone, a step toward the nanocomputer, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi antennas, accelerometer, gyroscope, compass and a battery. All inside the earpiece. Google has said that eventually, Glass will have a cellular radio, so it can get online; at this point, it hooks up wirelessly with your phone for an online connection. The tiny screen is completely invisible when you’re talking or driving or reading. You just forget about it completely. There’s nothing at all between your eyes and whatever, or whomever, you’re looking at. And yet when you do focus on the screen, shifting your gaze up and to the right, that tiny half-inch display is surprisingly immersive. It’s as though you’re looking at a big laptop screen or something.
Have a look on competitors (Apple, Microsoft, DARPA) similar projects on www.quantglass.com

A multi-institutional team of researchers, led by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has provided the first atomic-scale insights into the ferroelectric properties of nanocrystals. This breakthrough is critical for the development of the next generation of data storage devices as  one-inch chips storing terabytes of data. Working with the world’s most powerful transmission electron microscope, the researchers mapped the ferroelectric structural distortions in nanocrystals of germanium telluride, a semiconductor, and barium titanate, an insulator.

Atomic-resolution images of germanium telluride nanoparticles from Berkeley Lab’s TEAM I electron microscope, and electron holographic images of barium titanate nanoparticles (below) from BNL yielded the first detailed experimental information on ferroelectric order at the nanoscale.

“As we scale down our device technology from the microscale to the nanoscale, we need a better understanding of how critical material properties, such as ferroelectric behavior, are impacted,” says Paul Alivisatos, director of Berkeley Lab and one of the principal investigators in this research. “Our results provide a pathway to unraveling the fundamental physics of nanoscale ferroelectricity at the smallest possible size scales.”
Let's remind similar researches by an IBM team, described in a Nanocomputer.com former article. http://www.nanocomputer.com/?p=1620, and by a french team from CNRS-Paris. http://www.nanocomputer.com/?p=2590

Source: http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2012/07/10/ferroelectricity-on-the-nanoscale/

Enabling bioengineers to design new molecular machines for nanotechnology applications is one of the possible outcomes of a study by University of Montreal researchers that was published in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology today.  The scientists have developed a new approach to visualize how proteins assemble, which may also significantly aid our understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, which are caused by errors in assembly.

Alzheimer's and Parkinson's,are caused by errors in assembly. Here shown are two different assembly stages (purple and red) of the protein ubiquitin and the fluorescent probe used to visualize these stage (tryptophan: see yellow). 


“In order to survive, all creatures, from bacteria to humans, monitor and transform their environments using small protein nanomachines made of thousands of atoms,” explained the senior author of the study, Prof. Stephen Michnick of the university's department of biochemistry. “For example, in our sinuses, there are complex receptor proteins that are activated in the presence of different odor molecules. Some of those scents warn us of danger; others tell us that food is nearby.” Proteins are made of long linear chains of amino acids, which have evolved over millions of years to self-assemble extremely rapidly – often within thousandths of a split second – into a working nanomachine. “One of the main challenges for biochemists is to understand how these linear chains assemble into their correct structure given an astronomically large number of other possible forms,” Michnick said.

Source: http://www.nouvelles.umontreal.ca/udem-news/news/20120611-researchers-watch-tiny-living-machines-self-assemble.html

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute suggests that the replication process for DNA — the genetic instructions for living organisms that is composed of four bases (C, G, A and T) — is more open to unnatural letters than had previously been thought. An expanded "DNA alphabet" could carry more information than natural DNA, potentially coding for a much wider range of molecules and enabling a variety of powerful applications, from precise molecular probes and nanomachines to useful new life forms.

We now know that the efficient replication of our unnatural base pair isn't a fluke, and also that the replication process is more flexible than had been assumed,"" said Floyd E. Romesberg, associate professor at Scripps Research, principal developer of the new DNA bases, and a senior author of the new study. The Romesberg laboratory collaborated on the new study with the laboratory of co-senior author Andreas Marx at the University of Konstanz in Germany, and the laboratory of Tammy J. Dwyer at the University of San Diego.
Romesberg and his lab have been trying to find a way to extend the DNA alphabet since the late 1990s. In 2008, they developed the efficiently replicating bases NaM and 5SICS, which come together as a complementary base pair within the DNA helix, much as, in normal DNA, the base adenine (A) pairs with thymine (T), and cytosine (C) pairs with guanine (G).

Source:  http://www.nature.com/nchembio/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nchembio.966.html

Putting  into a microchip Graphene, has proven difficult. Scientists are working hard on it as graphene is the wonder material that could solve the problem of making ever faster computers and smaller mobile devices. The answer may lie in new nanoscale systems based on ultrathin layers of materials with exotic properties. Called two-dimensional layered materials, these systems could be important for microelectronics, various types of hypersensitive sensors, catalysis, tissue engineering and energy storage. Researchers at Penn State have applied one such 2D layered material, a combination of graphene and hexagonal boron nitride, to produce improved transistor performance at an industrially relevant scale.

“Other groups have shown that graphene on boron nitride can improve performance two to three times, but not in a way that could be scaled up. For the first time, we have been able to take this material and apply it to make transistors at wafer scale,” said Joshua Robinson, assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Penn State.

Source: http://live.psu.edu/story/59873#rssEarth_and_Mineral_Sciences

Researchers at University College London – Great Britain, have developed  the first purely silicon oxide-based ‘Resistive RAM’ memory chip that can operate in ambient conditions – opening up the possibility of new super-fast memory. Resistive RAM (or ‘ReRAM’) memory chips are based on materials, most often oxides of metals, whose electrical resistance changes when a voltage is applied – and they “remember” this change even when the power is turned off. ReRAM chips promise significantly greater memory storage than current technology, such as the Flash memory used on USB sticks, and require much less energy and space.

Dr Tony Kenyon, UCL Electronic and Electrical Engineering, said: “Our ReRAM memory chips need just a thousandth of the energy and are around a hundred times faster than standard Flash memory chips. The fact that the device can operate in ambient conditions and has a continuously variable resistance opens up a huge range of potential applications."

Source: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/May2012/120518-new-silicon-memory-chip

Mass production of nanoscale components for the next generation of computers is now possible.  Researchers in Ireland have developed a new technology using materials called bulk metallic glasses to produce high-precision molds for making tiny plastic components. The components, with detailed microscopically patterned surfaces could be used in the next generation of computer memory devices and microscale testing kits and chemical reactors.

"Our technology is a new process for mass producing high-value polymer components, on the micrometer and nanometer-scale," explains Gilchrist. "This is a process by which high-volume quantities of plastic components can be mass produced with one hundred times more precision, for costs that are at least ten times cheaper than currently possible."

In their article published in the latest edition of Materials Today, Michael Gilchrist, David Browne and colleagues at University College Dublin explain how bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) were discovered about thirty years ago. These materials are a type of metal alloy, but instead of having a regular, crystalline structure like an everyday metal such as iron or an alloy like bronze, the material's atoms are arranged haphazardly. This disordered, or amorphous atomic structure is similar to the amorphous structure of the silicon and oxygen atoms in the glass we use for windows and drinking vessels.

Source: http://www.materialstoday.com/view/25895/making-microscopic-machines-using-metallic-glass/

Imec, a belgian world-leading research company in nano-electronics. today announces that it has released an early-version PDK (process development kit) for 14nm logic chips. This PDK is the industry’s first to address the 14nm technology node. It targets the introduction of a number of new key technologies, such as FinFET technology and EUV lithography. The PDK is made available to Imec’s partners, and will be followed by incremental updates. Imec and its partners are developing a 14nm test chip to be released in the 2^nd half of 2012 using this PDK.

A well-made process design kit (PDK) can assist an integrated circuit (IC) designer to reach that goal by maximizing design productivity and providing a portal to the foundry where the IC will be fabricated.

This first 14nm PDK contains all elements for design assessment of the 14nm node through device compact models, parasitic extraction, design rules, parameterized cells (pcells), and basic logic cells. Starting from the PDK, Imec and its partners are now designing a first test chip.

Source: http://www2.imec.be/be_en/press/imec-news/14nm.html