Advances in Nano Electronics

This is pretty crazy how small electronics have become nowadays. Seriously! Now here are two U.S. teams of scientists that have just recently made breakthroughs in this field and promises to make already small computer technology even smaller.

Amazingly one team has made a transistor that is a quarter the size of modern day silicon chips and the other has made a film that can store data from 250 DVD-ROMs on the size of a single coin! They just published their results on Thursday in the journal Science. The first team who made the tiny transistors is from the University of Pittsburgh while the other is a joint team made up of participants from University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of California Berkeley. The Pittsburgh team crafted their atom-sized transistors by applying voltage to the the tip of an atomic force microscope to create a miniscule conducting wire between two materials. This conducting wire can also be erased by reversing the electrical charge of the voltage applied. This tiny transistor is probably the smallest electrical circuit every made, or at least thats what the team claims. This invention, at the very least will revolutionize computers, as it will miniaturize CPUs, processors and microchips, allowing for more power, in a smaller amount of space. On the other hand, the other team’s amazing high storage film is an equally amazing feat of scientific endeavour. To keep the structure of the film, the team, lead by Thomas Russell (of the University of Massachusetts) heated sapphire crystals to create a specific ridges on the surface, which serves as guide for polymer film.

I hope both of these technologies become succesful as they could revolutionize computers and their processing power, and create smaller, more powerful machines. To read more about these amazing inventions, check out Nano Electronics. To learn more about nanotechnology and nano-sized electronics check out this article at SciAm.

the lurker