Tag: polymers

Silver nanowires heal themselves

Posted on January 26, 2015 by - News

Silver coinNanotechnology is one of the great hopes of the electronics industry as Intel’s Moore’s Law reaches its inevitable end.
And one of the elements of this future are silver nanowires – regarded by some as a viable alternative for indium tin oxide.
The problem with indium tin oxide is that while it is one of the most used materials for plasma displays, touchscreens and flexible electronics, it is pricey.
So called silver nanowires, which can be one dimensionally embedded in flexible polymers is considered to be one of the answers because it’s transparent and conductive.
Scientists at Northwestern University in the USA said there’s been the lack of a real understanding of its mechanical properties.
But the scientists believe they now understand the behaviour of silver nanowire in electronics better.
A factor called cyclic loading can make conductive films fail but the research team believes that some of the material’s problems self heal, meaning that the wires can stand strong loads for long periods of time.
Essentially, the scientists have come up with a new method that allows them to understand when the materials are flexed millions of times.

 

Moore’s Law offered glimmer of hope

Posted on October 23, 2014 by - News

Intel-logoResearchers at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have thrown Intel a lifeline in the shape of self assembling molecules.

Alexander Liddle, a materials scientist at NIST pointed out that Intel has just gone into production on a 14 nanometre generation of chips.

Liddle explained that at these sizes the problem is creating multiple masking layers and optical lithography “is simply not capable of reliably reproducing the extremely small extremely densie patterns. There are tricks you can use such as creating multiple, overlapping masks, but they are very expensive,” he said.

He said two pieces of research by NIST, by IBM and by MIT show a way to deposit thin films of a polymer on a template so that it self-assembles into precise even rows 10 nanometres wide.

“The problem in semiconductor lithography is not really making small features – you can do that but you can’t pack them together,” he said.  “Block co-polymers take advantage of the fact that if you make small features relatively far apart, you can put the block co-polymer on those guiding patterns and fill in the small details,” he said.

He’s optimistic that the NIST model will give him accurate results.