A multi-institutional team of engineers has developed a new
approach to the fabrication of nanostructures for the semiconductor and
magnetic storage industries. This approach combines top-down advanced ink-jet
printing technology with a bottom-up approach that involves self-assembling
block copolymers, a type of material that can spontaneously form ultrafine
structures.
The team, consisting of nine researchers from the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Chicago and Hanyang
University in Korea, was able to increase the resolution of their intricate
structure fabrication from approximately 200 nanometers to approximately 15
nanometers. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter, the width of a
double-stranded DNA molecule.