Self-assembling Nano elements - Changing the face of storage
March 1, 2009
Imagine a world where you could store your entire life - Books, movies, music, your favourite VG’s, every tax document (hard to believe I know) on an array the size of a quarter? Well, it may be closer than you think. Super geniuses at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, demonstrated the feasibility of such a technique.
“Generating laterally ordered, ultradense, macroscopic arrays of nanoscopic elements will revolutionize the microelectronic and storage industries. We used faceted surfaces of commercially available sapphire wafers to guide the self-assembly of block copolymer microdomains into oriented arrays with quasi–long-range crystalline order over arbitrarily large wafer surfaces. Ordered arrays of cylindrical microdomains 3 nanometers in diameter, with areal densities in excess of 10 terabits per square inch, were produced. The sawtoothed substrate topography provides directional guidance to the self-assembly of the block copolymer, which is tolerant of surface defects, such as dislocations. The lateral ordering and lattice orientation of the single-grain arrays of microdomains are maintained over the entire surface. The approach described is parallel, applicable to different substrates and block copolymers, and opens a versatile route toward ultrahigh-density systems.”
1 Department of Polymer Science and Engineering, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, USA.
2 Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Yonsei University, Seoul 120-749, Korea.
3 Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Department of Chemistry, University of Berkeley, and Material Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
