Archive for the ‘Electronics’ Category
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August 4th, 2010
Golden beam pen arrays
Chad Mirkin’s group at Northwestern always seem to come up with elegent ideas, and this latest one is no different. Follwing on from the group’s development of polymer-pen lithography (PPL) in 2008 and Dip-Pen Nanolithography (DPN) in 1999, Beam-Pen lithography uses an array of tiny pyramidal pens made of a gold coated polymer to print patterns over large areas with nanoscopic through macroscopic resolution. The team used the technology to print the Chicago skyline 15,000 times in the space of just a few square centimetres, as shown above.Such miniturisation technologies have great potential in a range of fields including medical diagnostics and new electronic devices
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June 30th, 2010
New memory devices
New flexible non-volatile organic memory devices have been developed on plastic substrates based on organic thin-film transistors embedded with self-assembled gold nanoparticles. The team working on this is led by Jang-Sik Lee, former Samsung researcher and now at Kookmin University in South Korea. This is really cutting-edge stuff and could open up a whole new area for gold in electronics. See Nano Letters for more details
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June 1st, 2010
A touch of gold
This story on Discovery News intrigued me. It is reporting that…. “cheap, flexible touch screens made with silver and gold nanowires could soon be rolling off the presses and into cell phones, computers and more. The same technology could even be used in solar panels. Writing in the journal ACS Nano, scientists from Stanford University say the new technology could be immediately used in consumer electronics.”The story continues “….most touch screens and solar panels are glass-based. The hard, insulating glass helps protect and support the thin coating of electrically conductive metals. But glass is also brittle and heavy. When an object strikes a solar panel, or a person drops a cell phone, the glass can shatter. Touch screens made from thin plastic coated with silver and gold would weigh less, take up less volume, be more flexible and could be produced much more quickly than glass plates.”
What the story doesn’t mention is that one of the major problems with current touch screen technology concerns the use of indium tin oxide (ITO) for the conductive transparent layer. At current levels of mine production and consumption, some analysts predict that there is only 15 years supply of indium left.
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May 21st, 2010
Anyone for an iPad?
Regular readers of this blog know full well many of the electronic items we now take for granted contain gold – for example mobile phones and computers rely on small quantities of the metal for their operation. This, however, is something you don’t see everyday… -
May 4th, 2010
Gold-decorated carbon nanotubes
Two of the most commonly discussed nanomaterials are gold nanoparticles and carbon nanotubes (CNTs). In this review, written by Kurt Geckeler of the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea, potential applications of a combination of these two materials are discussed. The paper details how the attachment of metal nanoparticles to carbon nanotubes is new way to obtain novel hybrid materials with interesting properties for various applications such as catalysts and gas sensors as well as electronic and magnetic devices.
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April 28th, 2010
New Scientist shines the light
New Scientist has a nice article (apart from the ‘bling’ description!) on the use of precious metals and diamond in optical computing. It says:A team at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute in Daejeon, South Korea, recently transferred data between computer chips using plasmons to channel a broadband light signal along gold wires. Some manufacturers, including Intel, are beginning to use connections of this type to replace conventional wiring in personal computers.
The ultimate aim, though, is to have light itself perform the processing in every microchip. Part of the trick here lies in the ability to generate pulses of light and switch them on and off at high speed, all in a tiny space. The smallest conventional lasers measure several hundred nanometres across and so are simply too big for the task. To compete with transistors, a laser would need to be less than 50 nanometres across, an impossibility with conventional designs.
Then last year teams of physicists in the US and China created the first examples of a device known as a spaser, which gets its name from the fact that it amplifies surface plasmons in a similar way to how a laser boosts light. The spaser has a gold core wrapped in silica and dye molecules. When it is switched on – using an external light source at present, though the goal is to use an electric current – the gold core ripples with plasmons. These excite the dye molecules, which emit light. This light in turn creates more plasmons. The result is a beam of light from a device tens of nanometres wide.
This concept was highlighted in the white paper WGC published a few months ago.
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April 9th, 2010
IMAPS – SEMI Wire bonding workshop
IMAPS and SEMI are running a Wire Bonding Workshop at SEMICON West. The objective of the Wire Bonding Workshop is to have a unique forum that brings together scientists, engineers, manufacturing, academia, and business people from around the world who have been working in the area of wire bonding. If you are interested in presenting at the event please see the event website here. -
April 5th, 2010
Gold nanoparticles and organic electronics
There’s a nice article in Printed Electronics World detailing some work which has recently been carried out at De Montford University in the UK. The team, led by Dr Shashi Paul, have been charging gold nanoparticles in an electric field and using the resulting materials in memory devices. Gold has a number of advantages in such situations, as Dr Paul explained :
“The use of gold nanoparticles could be an essential step towards the mainstream adoption of organic electronics, as they are commercially readily available and do not oxidise or rust, unlike other nanoparticles which have been tested, such as iron. Conventional electronics have manufacturing steps at very high temperatures – sometimes up to 1,000oC, or greater – and these processes are extremely energy intensive and therefore expensive. Organic materials can be processed at room temperature and so require considerably less energy. It also means they can be used with cheap and flexible plastic substrates, which would melt in conventional silicon, high-temperature processing steps.”
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March 29th, 2010
‘Cold welding’ of ultrathin gold nanowires
The latest issue of nature nanotechnology carries an interesting article detailing observations from US researchers on the occurrence of ‘cold welding’ in gold and silver nanowires. This is potentially a significant development, as the connections made during the welding process (which itself is facile and reproducible) are of a notably high quality. The authors suggest that when combined with other nano- and microfabrication technologies, nanoscale cold welding has considerable potential in providing a route to bottom-up assembly of metallic nanostructures
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March 26th, 2010
Plastic memory chip
In the last few days a number of websites have picked up the use of gold nanoparticle-based memory in plastic electronics. You can read more about this here and here . Basically, the gold nanoparticles developed by the researchers have been proven to retain an electrical charge applied in tests, meaning information can be stored via charged and uncharged particles.
Trevor Keel
Richard Holliday
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