IBM showcases Nano art

IBM researchers are touting one of the tiniest pieces of art ever made -- an image of the sun made from 20,000 microscopic particles of gold.

The precision required is a breakthrough that heralds ultra-miniature sensors, lenses and wires inside nanoscale circuits of the future.

The sun painting, which was a 17th-century alchemist’s symbol for gold, was etched on a silicon chip ‘wafer’ with a technique that manipulated gold particles, each just 60 nanometres in diameter. A human hair is about 80,000 nanometres wide.

Scientists have been working to manipulate super-small circuits in an effort to continue improving the performance of electronic devices well into the future. Indeed, today’s most advanced microprocessors already involve components even smaller than 60 nanometres.

But the new research, published this month in Nature Nanotechnology, is different because the tiny particles were manipulated directly into their desired places with a method that could be economically reproduced in other nanoscale construction projects, even those with features as small as two nanometres.

For example, IBM researchers said the finely controlled placement of nanowires would be necessary for the high-performance transistors in molecular-scale chips. Or the tiny arrays someday could be used to test for exceedingly small traces of a disease.

“These are quite fundamental things that could go very broadly,” said Gian-Luca Bona, a manager in IBM’s Almaden Research Centre in San Jose. The research was conducted at IBM’s labs in Switzerland.

The promise in such ultra-small worlds is leading to a nanotech race inside IBM and rival companies. Recently, IBM disclosed that it had developed a method for encoding data on individual atoms.

Earlier this year, IBM rival Hewlett-Packard announced its own breakthrough in building tiny circuits. HP said researchers in the company’s HP Labs division had created technology used to build prototype circuits whose wires were just 15 nanometres wide.