Researchers from IBM are recently found an image sun,which is one of the tiniest pieces of art ever made. The precision is a breakthough for the future inventions.
The sun Painting, which was a 17th-century alchemist's symbol for gold, was etched on a silicon Chip "wafer" with a technique that manipulated gold particles each just 60 nanometers in diameter. That's 60 billionths of a meter; a human hair is about 80,000 nanometers wide.
Scientists at IBM and elsewhere have been working to manipulate super-small circuits in an effort to continue improving the performance of Electronic devices well into the future. Indeed, today's most advanced Microprocessors already involve components even smaller than 60 nanometers. And IBM researchers long ago showed they could spell out the company's name in individual atoms.
But the new research, published this month in Nature Nanotechnology, is different because the tiny particles were manipulated directly into their desired places with a method that could be economically reproduced in other nano-scale construction projects, even those with features as small as 2 nanometers. (Beyond that, the physical properties of individual atoms likely would get in the way.)
For example, IBM researchers said the finely controlled placement of nanowires would be necessary for high-performance transistors in molecular-scale Chips. Or the tiny arrays someday could be used to test for exceedingly small traces of a disease.
"These are quite fundamental things that could go very broadly," said Gian-Luca Bona, a manager in IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif. The research was conducted at IBM's labs in Switzerland.
The promise in such ultra-small worlds is leading to a nanotech race inside IBM and rival companies. Recently IBM disclosed that it had developed a method for encoding data on individual atoms.
Earlier this year, IBM rival Hewlet-Packard Co. announced its own breakthrough in building tiny circuits. HP said researchers in the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company's HP Labs division had created technology used to build prototype circuits whose wires were just 15 nanometers wide. The technology was licensed to a company called Nanolithosolutions Inc., of Carlsbad, Calif.
The patented technology involves a process called nanoimprint lithography, which is a way of stamping out patterns of wires less than 50 atoms wide.
