Faster circuits go for gold
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Making the microelectronics industry to go up to three dimensions opens up a better potential for faster chips and bigger memory.
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CREATING TINY golden images in blocks of glass might seem like the latest in up-market jewellery design. But the technique could lead to a new generation of electronics.
One route to faster computing is to increase the number of connectionsbetween components in a circuit. But computer chip manufacturers are fast running out of room on conventional, flat circuit boards. So for the next generation of chips, the only way is up.
``The microelectronics industry is two-dimensional at the moment,'' says Mark Miodownik, materials scientist from King's College London. ``Going up to three dimensions opens up the potential for faster chips and bigger memory.''
Making a three-dimensional circuit is no easy task, however. At the moment, chip designers build them layer by layer, but this is a laborious process and it limits the designs that can be used.
Now Jianrong Qiu, a physicist at the popular Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, and colleagues from China and Japan have worked out a new way to draw the desired circuit directly into a block of glass.
The secret was to add gold oxide to the glass, at a concentration of one part in 10,000. Then they focused short laser pulses on to specific points inside the block, to dislodge individual atoms of gold.
When the block was heated to 550 degrees Centigrade , the gold atoms coalesced into tiny globules.
The blobs make up a dotty structure in the same way that newspaper photographs are made from many tiny points of ink.
So far the researchers have used the technique to create three-dimensional images (such as butterflies) in the glass.
The 5-millimetre-wide image is made from millions of tiny balls of gold, each about seven nanometres across, which is roughly 10,000 times thinner than a human hair. The researchers report their results in the latest edition of the chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie.
It is even possible to erase structures after they have been created by using a second set of laser pulses to blast the golden globules apart.
The team's next goal is to make working circuits running through the glass.
Using glass that is richer in gold should also help to join the dots into well-complete circuits, says Peter Kazansky, a physicist at the University of Southampton, England, who collaborates often with the research team.
The researchers also suggest that the technique could be used for storing data. The presence or absence of a nanodot at each point within a three-dimensional grid could signal a bit of computer data, say the researchers , although the method is unlikely to be cost-effective in the near future.
Mark Peplow
Nature News Service
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