LITTLE BY LITTLE

NANOTECHNOLOGY IS IMPROVING MANUFACTURING IN WAYS BIG AND SMALL 

- DAMIEN MARTIN

When you get down to the nanoscale – we’re talking 100,000 times thinner than a piece of paper – some strange things happen. Materials, even everyday ones, exhibit qualities we don’t normally see. They’re much stronger, they conduct electricity better, and they’re more chemically reactive. Taking advantage of these properties, manufacturers are developing new ways to make electronics, deliver drugs, and create materials that can assemble themselves using “DNA origami.” Using such small scales, scientists are devising ways to enhance computing power and make manufacturing more energy efficient, among many other exciting applications.

TOP-DOWN & BOTTOM-UP

When it comes to manufacturing with nanotechnology, there are two ways to approach it. In the top-down method, manufacturers break down large materials, carving away with chemical or physical processes to break them down to the nanoscale. This is the more common method, used to make semiconductors and a host of other common items. It’s easier to do but can lead to imperfect surface structures.

Bottom-up nanofabrication involves building structures atom-by-atom or molecule-by-molecule. It’s more complicated, but it allows manufacturers the freedom to create more sophisticated materials with amazing properties. This atomically precise manufacturing uses strands of DNA to build structures that assemble themselves into 2D and 3D shapes, folding much like paper origami.

Researchers at Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute won a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation to design a manufacturing process for nanoelectronics using DNA. The hope is to combine those with top-down silicon-based circuits to make ultra high-density electronic systems that decrease transistor size while increasing computing power.