Self-forming nanoscale devices

By Lars Samuelson. 2003

229 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Devices that have been beyond the reach of engineers can now be fabricated in new ways. The crucial factor has been the development of a technique by which extremely narrow rods, or nanowires, of a semiconductor can be formed. The bottom-up, self-assembly process enables accurate control of dimension, location, composition, and other properties. The materials are the same semiconductors, like Si and GaAs, that we have, for the last forty or so years, been shaping into devices and circuits. But this process has relied on top-down fabrication techniques. The top-down approach limits the dimensions of devices to what is technically achievable using lithography. This is the means by which patterns can be drawn, either in stone as the Vikings did when they carved messages into granite, or into Si as the electronics industry does today to build integrated circuits. Lithographic techniques can create device features as narrow as 130 nm and the industry sees the road ahead pretty well drawn up for line-widths down to ∼50 nm. This continued progress does not come without a price; the cost of new fabs is growing extremely fast, at a pace that may limit continued progress, simply because devices and circuits become too expensive to be economically viable.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f5dabedbffd622a6cd00ac6a6c979d06711cd89a

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Lars Samuelson
2. Claes Thelander
3. M. Björk
4. W. Park
5. G. Yi
6. Chunrui Wang
7. I. Maximov
8. D. Suyatin

In Biomedical Engineering

1. Lars Samuelson
2. M. Björk
3. Claes Thelander
4. W. Park
5. G. Yi
6. Chunrui Wang
7. Magnus Borgström
8. Peidong Yang

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Lars Samuelson
2. M. Björk
3. Claes Thelander
4. W. Park
5. G. Yi
6. Chunrui Wang
7. I. Maximov
8. D. Suyatin

Citations in the corpus

• ZnO nanorods: synthesis, characterization and applications (2005, background): “for future electronics and photonics [1–3], as well as for”
• Sulfur passivation for ohmic contact formation to InAs nanowires (2007, background): “In the past few years, considerable progress in the control of semiconductor nanowire formation has been achieved, and already, a number of different nanowire-based applications have been demonstrated [1–4].”