Boffins create self assembling chips

BOFFINS AT the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are working out how to get computer chips to create themselves.

The trick apparently is to coax molecules to arrange themselves into tiny patterns. If they can train them to arrange themselves into the shape of a microchip, or a winning lottery ticket, then they will have reached their goal.

The process could lead to microprocessors with much smaller circuit elements.

So far they have made chainlike molecules arrange themselves on a silicon chip. They have not got them to sit, beg, or roll over and play dead.

In the journal Nature Nanotechnology, MIT researchers describe a process that could become an alternative to conventional photolithography for building semiconductor chips.

Caroline Ross and Karl Berggren, both engineering professors, used electron beam lithography to create nanoscale 'posts' on a silicon chip. They then deposited copolymers on the chip. The copolymers spontaneously linked to the posts and arranged themselves into useful patterns.

Apparently polymers want to get away from each other so badly that they will arrange themselves in predictable ways.

A variety of patterns that can be used in circuit design might be achieved by changing the shape and position of the posts, the proportions of the polymers, and the length of the molecule chains, the MIT researchers said.

When exposed to plasma, one polymer burns away, while the other turns to glass and a chip is born. µ