{"id":218283,"date":"2010-01-20T00:45:47","date_gmt":"2010-01-20T05:45:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/itecsinsider.com\/?p=13115"},"modified":"2010-01-20T00:45:47","modified_gmt":"2010-01-20T05:45:47","slug":"nanoengineering-discovery-could-lead-to-enhanced-electronics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/218283","title":{"rendered":"Nanoengineering Discovery Could Lead To Enhanced Electronics"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"nanotechnology\"(R&D, January 8, 2010) Nanoscience has the potential to play an enormous role in enhancing a range of products, including sensors, photovoltaics and consumer electronics.\u00a0 Scientists in this field have created a multitude of nano scale materials, such as metal nanocrystals, carbon nanotubes and semiconducting nanowires. However, despite their appeal, it has remained an astounding challenge to engineer the orientation and placement of these materials into the desired device architectures that are reproducible in high yields and at low costs, until now. Jen Cha, a UC San Diego nanoengineering professor, and her team of researchers, have discovered that one way to bridge this gap is to use biomolecules, such as DNA and proteins. Details of this discovery were recently published in a paper<\/a> titled \u201cLarge Area Spatially Ordered Arrays of Gold Nanoparticles Directed by Lithographically Confined DNA Origami,\u201d in Nature Nanotechology<\/em>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cSelf-assembled structures are often too small and affordable lithographic patterns are too large,\u201d said Albert Hung, lead author of the Nature Nanotechnology paper and a post doc working in Cha\u2019s lab. \u201cBut rationally designed synthetic DNA nanostructures allow us to access length scales between 5 and 100 nanometers and bridge the two systems.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cPeople have created\u00a0a\u00a0huge variety of unique and functional nanostructures, but for some intended applications they are worthless unless you can place individual structures, billions or trillions of them at the same time,\u00a0at precise locations,\u201d Hung added. \u201cWe hope that our research brings us a step closer to solving this very difficult problem.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Hung said the recently discovered method may be useful for fabricating nanoscale electronic or optical circuits and multiplex sensors. \u201cA number of groups have worked on parts of this research problem before, but to our knowledge, we’re the first to attempt to address so many parts together as a whole,\u201d he said.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the main applications of this research that Cha and her group are interested in is for sensing. \u201cThere is no foreseeable route to be able to build a complex array of different nanoscale sensing elements currently,\u201d said Cha, a former IBM research scientist who joined the UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering faculty in 2008. \u00a0\u201cOur work is one of the first clear examples of how you can merge top down lithography with bottom up self assembly to build such an array. That means that you have a substrate that is patterned by conventional lithography, and then you need to take that pattern and merge it with something that can direct the assembly of even smaller objects, such as those having dimensions between 2 and 20 nanometers. You need an intermediate template, which is the DNA origami, which has the ability to bind to something else much smaller and direct their assembly into the desired configuration. This means we can potentially build transistors from carbon nanotubes and also possibly use nanostructures to detect certain proteins in solutions. \u00a0Scientists have been talking about patterning different sets of proteins on a substrate and now we have the ability to do that.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Cha said the next step would be to actually develop a device based on this research method. \u201cI\u2019m very interested in the applications of this research and we\u2019re working our way to get there,\u201d she said.\u00a0 Click here to read more…<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(R&D, January 8, 2010) Nanoscience has the potential to play an enormous role in enhancing a range of products, including sensors, photovoltaics and consumer electronics.\u00a0 Scientists in this field have created a multitude of nano scale materials, such as metal nanocrystals, carbon nanotubes and semiconducting nanowires. However, despite their appeal, it has remained an astounding […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218283"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218283\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}