All New Electronics Self Teaching Guide
Electronics Projects & Circuits
Electronics Projects For Dummies:
Visit our other Website
Shrinking Electronics Components
How can nanotechnology make electronic components smaller and better?
Nanoelectronics involves the use of particles or features such as transistor channels that are incredibly tiny--less than 100 nanometers in size. That's about one thousandth the size of a single human hair or smaller.
Nanoelectronics may offer some interesting possibilities for increasing the capabilities of electronics devices while reducing their size and power consumption. Some of the areas under development, which you can explore in more detail by following the links provided in the next section, include:
- Improving display screens on electronics devices. This involves reducing power consumption while decreasing the weight and thickness of the screens.
- Increasing the density of memory chips. Researchers are developing a type of memory chip with a projected density of one terabyte of memory per square inch or greater.
- Reducing the size of transistors used in integrated circuits. One researcher believes it may be possible to "put the power of all of today's present computers in the palm of your hand".
Nanoelectronics: Who's Doing What?
Researchers are working in several areas. Here are just some of the nanoelectronics projects in the works today:
-
Building transistors from carbon nanotubes will enable minimum transistor dimensions of a few nanometers
Developing techniques to manufacture integrated circuits built with nanotube transistors.
-
Using electrodes made from nanowires would enable flat panel displays to be flexible as well as thinner than current displays.
-
Using MEMS techniques it's possible to control an array of probes whose tips have a radius of a few nanometers. These probes can then be used to write and read data onto a polymer film, with the aim of producing memory chips with a density of one terabyte per square inch or greater.
-
Transistors built in single-atom-thick graphene film will enable very high speed transistors.
-
Combining gold nanoparticles with organic molecules it's possible to create a transistor known as a NOMFET (Nanoparticle Organic Memory Field-Effect Transistor). Such a transistor functions like portions of a human nervous system called a synapse and may be used in building computers that function like human brains.
-
Using carbon nanotubes researchers are directing electrons to illuminate pixels, resulting in a lightweight, millimeter thick "nanoemmissive" display panels.
-
Making integrated circuits with features that can be measured in nanometers (nm), allows the production of integrated circuits with 45 nm wide, or less, transistor gates. This allows more transistors to be packed in a reasonably sized computer chip, resulting in more powerful microprocessors and higher capacity memory chips.
-
Using nanosized magnetic rings it's possible to make Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory (MRAM) which research has indicated may allow memory density of 400 GB per square inch.
-
Developing molecular-sized transistors may allow us to shrink the width of transistor gates to approximately one nm, which will significantly increase transistor density in integrated circuits.
-
Using self-aligning nanostructures enables the manufacture of nanoscale integrated circuits.
-
Using nanowires makes it possible to build transistors without p-n junctions.
-
Using magnetic quantum dots in spintronic semiconductor devices. Spintronic devices are expected to be significantly higher density and consume less power because they measure the spin of electronics to determine a 1 or 0, rather than measuring groups of electronics as is done in current semiconductor devices.
