U.S. engineers say they’ve developed a technique to grow individual carbon nanotubes vertically on top of a silicon wafer.
The Purdue University scientists say such a technique is a step toward making advanced electronics, wireless devices and sensors using nanotubes by stacking circuits and components in layers.
Verticality gives you the ability to fit more things into the same area, so you can add more and more layers while keeping the footprint the same size or smaller, said Timothy Fisher, an associate professor of mechanical engineering who is leading the work with Engineering Professor Timothy Sands. But before we can even think about using nanotubes in electronics, we have to learn how to put them where we want them.
The NASA-funded study — conducted at Purdue’s Birck Nanotechnology Center — is detailed in a research paper that appeared July 11 in the journal Nanotechnology.
