Water makes wires even more nano

The method by means of the Rice lab of chemist James excursion builds upon its discovery that the meniscus -- the curvy floor of water at its aspect -- can be an effective masks to make nanowires.

The Rice team of excursion and graduate students Vera Abramova and Alexander Slesarev have now made nanowires among 6 and sixteen nanometers huge from silicon, silicon dioxide, gold, chromium, tungsten, titanium, titanium dioxide and aluminum. they have also made crossbar systems of accomplishing nanowires from one or extra of the materials.

A paper on their technique, called meniscus-mask lithography, has been posted on-line through the yankee Chemical Society magazine Nano Letters.

The method is promising for the semiconductor industry as it seeks to make circuits ever smaller. today's included circuit fabrication permits for sign wires that technique 10 nanometers, seen only with effective microscopes. these are the trails that connect the billions of transistors in contemporary digital devices.

"this could have large ramifications for chip manufacturing for the reason that wires are easily made to sub-10-nanometer sizes," excursion stated of the Rice process. "there's no different manner within the world to do this en masse on a floor."

cutting-edge procedures to making such tiny wires take several paths. Lithography, the standard method for etching integrated circuits, is drawing close the physical limits of its ability to decrease them further. Bulk synthesis of semiconducting and metallic nanowires is likewise feasible, but the wires are difficult to place in integrated circuits.

Water's tendency to adhere to surfaces went from an annoyance to an advantage when the Rice researchers found they might use it as a mask to make patterns. The water molecules collect wherever a raised sample joins the target material and forms a curved meniscus created through the floor tension of water.

The meniscus-mask technique involves adding after which doing away with materials in a series that in the end leaves a meniscus protecting the cord and hiking the sidewall of a sacrificial metallic mask that, while etched away, leaves the nanowire standing alone.

tour said the process need to paintings with present day fabrication generation with out a changes to current gadget and minimum adjustments in fabrication protocols. No new equipment or substances are wanted.

excursion is the T.T. and W.F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of substances technology and nanoengineering and of laptop technological know-how and a member of Rice's Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale technology and technology.