It's quite a well known fact that we owe science in general and researchers in particular just about everything that we see around us nowadays, especially when talking about electronics. Indeed, it takes a while to translate a scientific discovery into consumer-grade products, but we certainly hope that this will happen in the case of the latest discovery made by Xiang Zhang, a UC Berkeley professor of mechanical engineering, and his team.
They managed to combine metal lenses that focus light through the excitation of electrons – or plasmons – on the surface of the lens with a "flying head" that resembles the stylus or the arm of an old-fashioned LP turntable, thus creating line patterns only 80 nanometers wide at speeds of up to 12 meters per second.
"Utilizing this plasmonic nanolithography, we will be able to make current microprocessors more than 10 times smaller, but far more powerful," said Zhang. "This technology could also lead to ultra-high density disks that can hold 10 to 100 times more data than disks today."This whole development is based on the optical lithography process, in which light is transferred through a mask with the desired circuit pattern onto a photosensitive material, or photoresist, that reacts chemically when exposed. The material thus obtained is then "dipped" into a series of baths containing various chemicals, the ultimate goal of this process being to etch the circuit design onto a wafer.
What the engineers from Berkeley did was to design a silver plasmonic lens with concentric rings that concentrated the light to a hole in the center where it exited on the other side. In the experiment, the hole was less than 100 nanometers in diameter, but it would seem that it can theoretically be as small as 5 to 10 nanometers. The researchers packed the lenses into a flying plasmonic head, called so because it would "fly" above the photoresist surface during the lithography process. And apparently, this flying head could hold up to a whopping 100,000 lenses, enabling parallel writing for even faster production.
"I expect in three to five years we could see industrial implementation of this technology," Zhang added. "This could be used in microelectronics manufacturing or for optical data storage and provide resolution that is 10 to 20 times higher than current blu-ray technology."