>From owner-nanomech-l@netcom.com Fri Apr 7 06:42:13 1995
From: szabo@netcom.com (Nick Szabo)
Subject: (fwd) Cornell's micro STM
To: nanomech-l@netcom.com
Date: Fri, 7 Apr 1995 06:02:06 -0700 (PDT)
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CORNELL'S NANOTECHNOLOGY BREAKTHROUGH
A thumbnail-sized device capable of holding the information contained on 10,000
standard hard drives? Cornell University researchers have shrunk a device
called the scanning tunneling microscope (STM), which could advance computer
storage technology to such a level within the decade.
The miniature microscope comes from eight years of research at Cornell, headed
by Noel C. MacDonald, a professor of electrical engineering, and furthered
through the dedication of many doctoral students.
A spokesperson for the team at Cornell said, "This is potentially a major
breakthrough for the computer industry. Right now we are capable of moving the
device, scanning two dimensions, and getting images. By lining up eight of them
it could read one byte at a time. We are talking about a size-scale of an
individual atom at a time."
The actual device is called a microelectromechanical scanning tunneling
microscope (MEM STM) which has a silicon tip with three actuators that provide
the force to move the tip in three dimensions. A conventional STM is about the
size of a thumbnail or 1.5 to 2 centimeters square. The STM uses piezoelectric
motors to scan a tip across the surface and generates an atom-sized image of
the surface of the material.
MacDonald says the devices can be scaled down to make them scan even faster and
he suggest speeds in the order of a thousand to a million cycles per second.
Placed by the thousands on a chip in a massively parallel fashion, you could
move things around in microseconds that once took minutes to do, he suggests.
The researchers say it will be possible to put an array of micro-STMs with each
tip storing millions of bits of information, as microrobots, in an area no
larger than the diameter of a human hair. A micro-STM is 200 microns x 200
microns (about the diameter of a human hair) and can scan on the order of 1
micrometer x 1 micrometer. Applications of this microrobotic technology are
almost without limit.
Cornell University is applying for technology patents and has entered into a
partnership with TMS Technologies of Ithaca, New York, to license technology in
microelectronic processing techniques emerging from Cornell.
Steven C. Vetter
Molecular Manufacturing Enterprises, Inc.
9653 Wellington Lane
Saint Paul, MN 55125