Cool electronics

Chemists and engineers at

have made robust circuits from minuscule nanowires that align themselves on a chip of glass during low-temperature fabrication, creating rudimentary electronic devices that offer solid performance without high-temperature production or high-priced silicon.

The researchers, led by chemist Charles M. Lieber and engineer Donhee Ham, produced circuits at low temperature by running a nanowire-laced solution over a glass substrate, followed by regular photolithography to etch the pattern of a circuit. Their merging of low-temperature fabrication and nanowires in a high-performance electronic device is described this week in the journal Nature.

"By using common, lightweight and low-cost materials such as glass or even plastic as substrates, these nanowire circuits could make computing devices ubiquitous, allowing powerful electronics to permeate all aspects of living," says Lieber, the Mark Hyman Jr. Professor of Chemistry in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "Because this technique can create a high-quality circuit at low temperatures, it could be a technology that finally decouples quality electronics from single crystal silicon wafers, which are resilient during high-temperature fabrication but also very expensive."