Self-stacking nanogrids
Since the 1960s, computer chips have been built using a process called photolithography. But in the past five years, chip features have gotten smaller than the wavelength of light, which has required some ingenious modifications of photolithographic processes. Keeping up the rate of circuit miniaturization that we’ve come to expect — as predicted by Moore’s Law — will eventually require new manufacturing techniques. Block copolymers, molecules that spontaneously self-assemble into useful shapes, are one promising alternative to photolithography. In a new paper in the journal Nature Communications, MIT researchers describe the first technique for stacking layers of block-copolymer wires such that the wires in one layer naturally orient themselves perpendicularly to those in the layer below. The ability to easily produce such “mesh structures” could make self-assembly a much more practical way to manufacture memory, optical chips, and even future generations of computer processors. “There is previous work on fabricating a mesh structure...