Drive for size

A new manufacturing technique could overcome the technological limitations currently facing the microelectronics and data-storage industries, and pave the way for smaller electronic devices and higher-capacity hard drives.

Researchers at the

and

have developed a technology that combines lithography techniques traditionally used to print, or pattern, microelectronic circuits with self-assembling materials called block copolymers. These consist of two or more chemically different polymer segments, or blocks, connected by a junction point.

When added to a lithographically-printed surface, the copolymers' long molecular chains spontaneously assemble into the designated arrangements.

'The block of polymer molecules are half of one chemistry make-up and half of another, and the molecules want to be with their own kind,' explained Juan de Pablo, co-director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Nanoscale Science and Engineering Centre (NSEC).

'So one half goes one way and one half goes the other, and to be able to meet the constraints of these two pieces of the molecule they self-assemble into ordered structures.'