Mar 10 2010
Some laws are made to be broken, and others are made to be followed. A team of IBM Researchers in collaboration with two Swiss partners are looking to keep one law in particular alive and well for another 15 years: Moore's Law. The law states that the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit will double every 18 months. More than 50 years old, this law is still in effect, but to extend it as long as 2020 will require a change from mere transistor scaling to novel packaging architectures such as so-called 3D integration, the vertical integration of chips.
The end result is a diamond-like carbon material that virtually doesn’t wear, mass-produced at the nanoscale. The new nano-sized tip, researchers say, wears away at the rate of only one atom per micrometer of sliding on a substrate of silicon dioxide, much lower than that for a silicon oxide tip which represents the current state-of-the-art. Consisting of carbon, hydrogen, silicon and oxygen molded into the shape of a nano-sized tip and integrated on the end of a silicon microcantilever for use in atomic force microscopy, the material has technological implications for atomic imaging, probe-based data storage and emerging applications such as nanolithography, nanometrology and nanomanufacturing.
The importance of the discovery lies not just in its size and resistance to wear but also in the hard substrate against which it was shown to perform well when in sliding contact: silicon dioxide. Because silicon—used in almost all integrated circuit devices—oxidizes in atmosphere, forming a thin layer of its oxide, this system is the most relevant for nanolithography, nanometrology and nanomanufacturing applications.
Probe-based technologies are expected to play a dominant role in many such technologies; however, poor wear performance of many materials when slid against silicon oxide, including silicon oxide itself, has severely limited their usefulness in the laboratory.
Researchers built the material from the ground up, rather than coating a nanoscale tip with wear-resistant materials. The collaboration team used a molding technique to fabricate monolithic tips on standard silicon microcantilevers. A bulk processing technique is available that has the potential to scale up for commercial manufacturing.
Robert Carpick, professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at Penn, and his research group had previously shown that carbon-based thin films, including diamond-like carbon, had low friction and wear at the nanoscale; however, it has been difficult to fabricate nanoscale structures made out of diamond-like carbon until now.
Understanding friction and wear at the nanoscale is important for many applications that involve nanoscale components sliding on a surface.
“It is not clear whether materials that are wear-resistant at the macroscale will exhibit the same property at the nanoscale,” lead author Harish Bhaskaran, who was a postdoctoral research at IBM during the study, said.
Defects, cracks and other phenomena that influence material strength and wear at macroscopic scales are less important at the nanoscale, which is why nanowires can, for example, show higher strengths than bulk samples.
The study, published in the current edition of the journal Nature Nanotechnology, was conducted collaboratively by Carpick and postdoctoral researcher Papot Jaroenapibal of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics in Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science; Bhaskaran, Bernd Gotsmann, Abu Sebastian, Ute Drechsler, Mark A. Lantz and Michel Despont of IBM Research-Zurich; and Yun Chen and Kumar Sridharan of the University of Wisconsin. Jaroenapibal currently works at Khon Kaen University in Thailand, and Bhaskaran currently works at Yale University.
Research was funded by a European Commission grant and the Nano/Bio Interface Center of the University of Pennsylvania through the National Science Foundation.