New method promises easier nanoscale manufacturing

The new research, published July 28 in Science, is

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expected to make such materials easily available for eventual use in everything from LED displays to cellular phones to photodetectors and solar cells. Though nanomaterials are promising for future devices, ways to build them into complex structures have been limited and small-scale.

"This is a step needed to move quantum dots and many other nanomaterials from proof-of-concept experiments to real technology we can use," said co-author Dmitri Talapin, professor of chemistry at UChicago and a scientist with the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne. "It really expands our horizons."

The foundation of modern computing is a tiny switch called the transistor, made billions at a time by a technique called photolithography. This process, which has made smartphones cheap and ubiquitous, carves a stencil out of a layer of organic polymer by laying down a patterned "mask" and illuminating it with ultraviolet light. After the new material is deposited on top, the polymer stencil is lifted off to reveal the pattern. Several rounds of such patterning build a miniature transistor onto the material.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-07-method-easier-nanoscale.html#jCp