IBM Finds Way to Build Chips Atom by Atom

IBM scientists said Thursday that they have come up with a method to assemble semiconductors atom by atom, a development that could usher in a new era of electronics miniaturization.

They said the breakthrough lays the groundwork for the manufacture of entirely new types of semiconductors measuring a thousandth the size of the tiniest devices now made.

Semiconductors are the electronic brains of high-tech machines, driving everything from digital watches and tape recorders to powerful number-crunching computers.

“Miniaturization has been the driving force of electronics,” International Business Machines Corp. scientist Phaedon Avouris told Reuters.

“This development can also result in smaller and smaller computers, or whatever you want, without sacrificing power,” Avouris said in a telephone interview.

Making things tinier is an obsession of electronic engineers, and progress in reducing the size of semiconductor chips ushered in microelectronics, in which electronic equipment is measured in microns--or millionths of a meter.

Scientists are already at work on a new generation of “submicro” electronics gear measuring 10ths of a micron.

Now, IBM’s In-Whan Lyo and Avouris have developed an approach that could lead to “nanoelectronics”--in which semiconductors consist of just a few dozen atoms and are measurable in nanos, or billionths of a meter.

Their findings were to be published in today’s Science magazine.

IBM said the ability to move individual atoms was merely the first step in developing the necessary technology to build nanoelectronic devices, which might take another decade.

Avouris said the technique had potential applications in electronic switching, amplifying electric signals, turning signals into light and turning light into electric signals.

“How this method is going to be used is now up to the electronic engineers,” he said.

But Avouris said their work could lead to smaller, faster and more powerful computers and other electronic devices based on new types of semiconductors using different physical principles than today’s chips and transistors.

“The main goal is speed. Electrical signals have a finite speed, so the smaller the devices, the faster they can switch because the signals do not need to travel as far,” he said.

Avouris said he and Lyo had opened the door to developing new types of semiconductors by looking at the challenge of miniaturization from a different direction.

“Rather than try to further reduce the size of a classical electronic device such as a transistor, we have demonstrated a method of building up a new type of device, one atom at a time,” Avouris said.

Physical principles able to be harnessed in such tiny devices are not present in larger devices now in use, he said.