Blog on Nanotechnology in Electronics

The ideas and concepts behind nanoscience and nanotechnology started with a talk entitled There’s a plenty of room at the bottom” by physicist Richard Feynman at an American Physical Society meeting at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) on December 29, 1959, long before the term nanotechnology was used. In his talk, Feynman described a process in which scientists would be able to manipulate and control individual atoms and molecules. Over a decade later, in his explorations of ultraprecision machining, Professor Norio Taniguchi coined the term nanotechnology. It wasn't until 1981, with the development of the scanning tunneling microscope that could "see" individual atoms, that modern nanotechnology began

Nano-materials are miniaturization of materials. Building of machines at the molecular scale that involves the manipulation of materials on an atomic scale were about two-tenths of a nanometer is called Nanotechnology.

Nanotechnology is also defined as the study of structures which are in size between 1 to 100 nanometers. Its size is eight hundred 100 nanometer particles placed side by side will be equal to the width of a human hair. 

Nanotechnology in Electronics: Nanoelectronics

Nanoelectronics is defined as nanotechnology which allows the integration of purely electronic devices, electronic chips and circuits. The digital systems are combined with analog circuits. This type of technology fusion can be described as the ‘More than Moore’ domain of development. The nanoscale dimensions of Nano electronic components for systems of giga-scale complexity measured on a chip or in a package. This scaling feature and the road to giga-scale systems can be described as the ‘More Moore’ domain of development.

Nanotechnology improves the capabilities of electronic components

·       By reducing the size of transistors used in integrated circuits.

·       Researchers are developing a type of memory chip with a projected density of one terabyte of memory per square inch and this increases the density of memory chips.

·       By improving display screens on electronics devices and this reduces power consumption and also the weight and thickness of the screens.

·       By traditional scaling limits in standard CMOS technology. This development of Nano electronic components are called as ‘Beyond CMOS’ domain of development.

 

Nanotechnology for Flexible Electronics

Stretchable electronics or flexible electronics is likely to be the future of mobile electronics, with leading companies such as Samsung, Nokia, and Sony planning to incorporate this technology into their products. Potential applications include wearable electronic devices, biomedical uses, compact portable devices, and smart skin for implantable electronics and robotic devices. These applications will require each component of modern electronic devices to be adapted for flexibility, from display screens to power sources.

Nanotechnologies for Flexible Electronics: Nanomaterials are playing a vital role in the development of flexible electronics. Only by manipulating the nanoscale structure of materials we can create components with the necessary electronic properties which can also be made flexible.

A fully stretchable supercapacitor composed of carbon nanotube microfilms, a polyurethane membrane separator and organic electrolytes, developed by researchers at the University of Delaware.

Some of the materials which are being developed for use in flexible devices are listed below.

·        Carbon nanotube-based flexible supercapacitors as an alternative to batteries

·        Elastic conducting interconnects using CNT-polymer composites

·        Conducting nanoparticle inks for printing circuits on flexible substrates

·        Organic LED displays

·        Flexible transparent conductors for touch screens, OLED displays and solar panels - carbon nanotubes and copper or silver nanowires have been investigated as potential materials to replace the ubiquitous non-flexible indium tin oxide (ITO).

Applications of Nanoelectronics under Development

Applications of Nanoelectronics under Development

Below were the nanoelectronics applications and projects into which Researchers were looking:

·        Integrating silicon nano photonics components into CMOS integrated circuits. This optical technique is intended to provide higher speed data transmission between integrated circuits than is possible with electrical signals.

·        Researchers have demonstrated a low power method to use nanomagnets as switches, like transistors, in electrical circuits. Their method might lead to electrical circuits with much lower power consumption than transistor-based circuits.

·        Silver nanoparticle ink was used to form the conductive lines needed in circuit boards. A method to print prototype circuit boards using standard inkjet printers was developed.

·        Nanowires that would enable flat panel displays to be flexible made from electrodes.

·        Transistors built in single atom thick graphene film to enable very high-speed transistors.

·        Building transistors from carbon nanotubes to enable minimum transistor dimensions of a few nanometers and developing techniques to manufacture integrated circuits built with nanotube transistors.

Nano Integrated Circuits

·        Using carbon nanotubes to direct electrons to illuminate pixels, resulting in a lightweight, millimeter thick “Nano emissive” display panel.

·        Using Nano sized magnetic rings to make Magneto resistive Random-Access Memory (MRAM).

·        Researchers have developed lower power, higher density method using nanoscale magnets called magnetoelectric random access memory (Me RAM) and also developed molecular-sized transistors which increase transistor density in integrated circuits.

Nanoelectronics Devices

Spintronics: Besides transistors, nanoelectronics devices play a role in data storage (memory). Here, spintronics – the study and exploitation in solid-state devices of electron spin and its associated magnetic moment, along with electric charge – is already an established technology.

Illustration of electron spin in a graphene lattice. (Image: Bart van Wees)

Optoelectronics: Electronic devices that source, detect and control light – i.e. optoelectronic devices – come in many shapes and forms. Highly energy-efficient (less heat generation and power consumption) optical communications are increasingly important because they have the potential to solve one of the biggest problems of our information age: energy consumption. In the field of nanotechnology, materials like nanofibers and carbon nanotubes have been used and especially graphene has shown exciting potential for optoelectronic devices. 

Future of Nanoelectronics – Electronics without Current

1. The waste heat produced by integrated circuits and consumption of power are the problems that face both laptop users and high-performance data centers.
2. The researchers are exploring new way for designing and making logic circuits by integrating photosensitive organic molecules into tiny particles of semiconductor material called quantum dots.
3. Researchers at the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) of TUT are developing a technology platform for the logic circuit made up of quantum dots.
4. Current is simply the flow of electrons in a particular direction. This new type of logic circuit consumes no current because the movement occurs when a single electron travels from one quantum dot to another.
5. Nano-engineered solar panels produce more energy.
6. Nanotech batteries last longer, lighter and more powerful.

Blog by: Yash Jaiswal, Pranjal Shrivastava, Chinmay Thete, Suraj Ukirade, Shraddha Walwekar