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26 April 2010 ,
Written by Dhruv Tanwar
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IBM has created a miniature 3D map of the Earth that is so small that a thousand of them could fit on a single grain of salt.
IBM scientists created the map though a breakthrough technique that uses a tiny, silicon tip with a sharp apex — 100,000 times smaller than a sharpened pencil — to create patterns and structures as small as 15 nanometers at greatly reduced cost and complexity. IBM said this patterning technique opens new prospects for developing nano-sized objects in fields such as electronics, future chip technology, medicine, life sciences, and optoelectronics. To demonstrate its capability, the team created several 3D and 2D patterns using different materials for each, as as reported in the scientific journals Science and Advanced Materials:
- A 25-nanometer-high 3D replica of the Matterhorn, a famous Alpine mountain that soars 4,478 m (14,692 ft) high, was created in molecular glass, representing a scale of 1:5 billion.**
- Complete 3D map of the world measuring only 22 by 11 micrometers was "written" on a polymer. At this size, 1,000 world maps could fit on a grain of salt. In the relief, one thousand meters of altitude correspond to roughly eight nanometers (nm). It is composed of 500,000 pixels, each measuring 20 nm2, and was created in only 2 minutes and 23 seconds.
- 2D nano-sized IBM logo was etched 400-nm-deep into silicon, demonstrating the viability of the technique for typical nano-fabrication applications.
- 2D high-resolution 15-nm dense line patterning.
The core component of the new technique that was developed by a team of IBM scientists, is a tiny, very sharp silicon tip measuring 500 nanometers in length and only a few nanometers at its apex. The tip, similar to the ones used in atomic force microscopes, is attached to a bendable cantilever that controllably scans the surface of the substrate material with the accuracy of one nanometer—a millionth of a millimeter. By applying heat and force, the nano-sized tip can remove substrate material based on predefined patterns, thus operating like a "nanomilling" machine with ultra-high precision. IBM's new technique achieves resolutions as high as 15 nanometers — with a potential of going even smaller.
Potential applications of the new technology, IBM said, range from the fast prototyping of nano-sized devices for future computer chips to the production of well defined micron-sized optical elements like aspheric lenses and lens-arrays for optoelectronics and on-chip optical communication. |