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UW Team Takes Big Step in Tiny World of Computer Chips

Posted on: Sunday, 17 August 2008, 15:10 CDT

By KATHLEEN GALLAGHER

An iPod equipped with a tiny disk drive can hold up to 200 hours of video, or 40,000 songs.

In other words, not nearly enough.

The continuing effort to squeeze more digital material into ever smaller devices has taken a big step forward at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where researchers have helped develop a novel technique for making computer chips.

The team used materials called "block copolymers" that can assemble themselves into microscopic patterns printed onto chips used in disk drives. The technique has the potential to make the mass production of higher-capacity drives possible at a reasonable price, some experts say.

"We're making structures 1,000 to 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. The problem isn't so much making one of these structures; it's making billions of them -- and they all have to be perfect," said Paul Nealey, director of the UW-Madison Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center.

Nealey, along with Juan de Pablo and others at the center, co- authored a paper about the technique appearing in today's edition of the journal Science. The UW team worked with researchers from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies to develop the technology.

Chip-makers use a process known as lithography to print patterns on chips that tell them how to operate. As components have gotten smaller, fitting more and more high-capacity circuitry on chips has become increasingly difficult.

Teams of researchers around the world are racing to get past technical obstacles to this problem, trying to develop self- assembling materials like those Nealey's team is making.

Given the demand for computers, cell phones and medical equipment that use computing power and require large amounts of digital storage, the potential market for products that solve this problem is in the hundreds of billions, said Winslow Sargeant, a managing director at Venture Investors in Madison, who was a chip designer at IBM and AT&T's Bell Labs.

Nealey's team has an advantage in working with a company like Hitachi, Sargeant said.

The team seems to be "a little further along" than groups Sargeant has seen in Europe, he said.

"This is a collaboration between a smart group of scientists and a company whose job is to make money, so they have a shot," Sargeant said.

Nealey's team of experts in chemicals, materials and molecular interactions didn't begin working on computer chips for a long time - - until computer technology reached the molecular level they work at, Nealey said.

The Science article shows that Nealey's team is getting good results in terms of manufacturing chips for disk drives, said John Hardiman, a licensing manager at the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which patented the work.

"This is a new potential platform technology," the kind of technology that can lead to a range of new products, Hardiman said.

It takes about six years, on average, for new chip technologies to make it into production, Sargeant said, because the facilities that companies such as Intel and IBM use to make chips cost $4 billion to $5 billion and are too expensive to retrofit.

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On the Net:

• University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Science

Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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