Building chips from collapsing nanopillars
The manufacture of nanoscale devices — the transistors in computer chips, the optics in communications chips, the mechanical systems in biosensors and in microfluidic and micromirror chips — still depends overwhelmingly on a technique known as photolithography. But ultimately, the size of the devices that photolithography can produce is limited by the very wavelength of light. As nanodevices get smaller, they’ll demand new fabrication methods.In a pair of recent papers, researchers at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics and Singapore’s Engineering Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) have demonstrated a new technique that could produce chip features only 10 nanometers — or about 30 atoms — across. The researchers use existing methods to deposit narrow pillars of plastic on a chip’s surface; then they cause the pillars to collapse in predetermined directions, covering the chip with intricate patterns.Ironically, the work was an offshoot of research attempting to prevent the collapse...