Future electronic devices could use self-assembling molecules

The research team created a ‘pavement’ of pentagonal cyclopentadienyl (C5H5) ‘tiles’ — resulting in a stable and highly conductive film.

As project lead Dr Holly Hedgeland of Cambridge explained to The Engineer, it represents an important step in the ‘bottom-up’ manufacture of nanoscale devices.

‘Obviously you can manufacture things on a one-off basis, using things such as probe microscopy — pushing things around with a tip basically — but that’s not going to be scaled up to anything that’s realistic,’ she said. ’We’re really trying to look at the fundamental properties and see how we can use them.’

Currently, commercial electronics use a top-down approach, with the milling or etching away of inorganic material, such as silicon. For many years, the computing power of a given size of computer chip has been doubling every 18 months (a phenomenon known as Moore’s law) but a limit in this growth is soon expected. 

At the same time, the efficiency of coupling electronic components to incoming or outgoing light (either in the generation of electricity from sunlight or in the generation of light from electricity in flat-screen displays and lighting) is also fundamentally limited by the scale of the circuitry.