OTHER ELECTRONICS & NANOTECHNOLOGY
UPDATE
October 2014
McIlvaine Company
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
5
Manufacturing Facilities to Rise in India
Nanofoundries Cast Custom Nanoparticles
New Tech
for Fast, Cheap Nanomanufacturing
Yale and
Leica Microsystems Partner for Microscopy Center of Excellence
Celestica
Opens Microelectronics Laboratory
At least five companies—three foreign and two local—are primed to build new manufacturing facilities in different parts of India.
Leading the group is South Korean giant Samsung, which recently got the nod of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology for the company's investment proposal. The approval has been given under the modified special incentive package scheme (MSIPS), which is in line with the target set by the Indian government to import zero electronic by 2020.
Samsung has been among the first set of companies that showed interest in investing here under the said scheme, with the goal of enhancing its electronics production capacity in the country. The company will invest ₹4.06 million in handset manufacturing.
Taiwan-based MediaTek also bared its plan to invest ₹1,212 crore during the course of the next few years. It will establish an R&D facility in Bangalore, which will focus on developing innovative solutions for wireless communications. The company is also trying to build its presence in other markets such as connectivity and home entertainment devices.
Another foreign company that is expected to establish a facility in Bangalore is billion-dollar firm TE Connectivity. It will invest ₹3,000 million for its 26,000sqm (279,760 sq. ft.) integrated manufacturing unit. Once operational, the plant will provide jobs in assembling, stamping, molding and packaging among others.
Two home-grown firms are also set to invest here.
The first one is Servokon Systems Ltd, which will soon launch its 5.000sqm (53,800 sq. ft. ) factory in Ghaziabad. The investment is part of the company's plan to expand its product range up to 15MVA in the industrial segment. This year, it plans to breach the ₹500 million turnover mark.
Finally, Larsen & Toubro Construction has commissioned a 7.2MW solar photovoltaic plant on a single roof in Punjab. Reaching as wide as 94,000sqm (1,011,440 sq. ft.), the company has successfully erected over 30,000 panels on the rooftop of the shed.
The concept of casting nanoparticles inside DNA molds is very much alike the Japanese method of growing watermelons inside cube-shaped glass boxes. Researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard Univ. have unveiled a new method to form 3-D metal nanoparticles in prescribed shapes and dimensions using DNA as a construction mold.
The ability to mold inorganic nanoparticles out of materials such as gold and silver in precisely designed 3-D shapes is a significant breakthrough that has the potential to advance laser technology, microscopy, solar cells, electronics, environmental testing, disease detection and more.
"We built tiny foundries made of stiff DNA to fabricate metal nanoparticles in exact three–dimensional shapes that we digitally planned and designed," said Peng Yin, senior author of the paper, Wyss Core Faculty member and assistant professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School.
The Wyss team's findings were published in Science. The work was done in collaboration with MIT's Laboratory for Computational Biology and Biophysics, led by Mark Bathe, senior co–author of the paper.
"The paper's findings describe a significant advance in DNA nanotechnology as well as in inorganic nanoparticle synthesis," Yin said. For the very first time, a general strategy to manufacture inorganic nanoparticles with user-specified 3-D shapes has been achieved to produce particles as small as 25 nanometers or less, with remarkable precision (less than five nanometers). A sheet of paper is approximately 100,000 nanometers thick.
The 3-D inorganic nanoparticles are first conceived and meticulously planned using computer design software. Using the software, the researchers design three–dimensional "frameworks" of the desired size and shape built from linear DNA sequences, which attract and bind to one another in a predictable manner.
"Over the years, scientists have been very successful at making complex 3-D shapes from DNA using diverse strategies," said Wei Sun, a postdoctoral scholar in the Wyss' Molecular Systems Lab and the lead author of the paper. For example, in 2012, the Wyss team revealed how computer-aided design could be used to construct hundreds of different self–assembling one-, two- and three-dimensional DNA nanoshapes with perfect accuracy. It is this ability to design arbitrary nanostructures using DNA manipulation that inspired the Wyss team to envision using these DNA structures as practical foundries, or molds, for inorganic substances.
"The challenge was to translate this kind of 3-D geometrical control into the ability to cast structures in other diverse and functionally relevant materials, such as gold and silver," Sun said.
Just as any expanding material can be shaped inside a mold to take on a defined 3-D form, the Wyss team set out to grow inorganic particles within the confined hollow spaces of stiff DNA nanostructures.
The concept can be likened to the Japanese method of growing watermelons in glass cubes. By nurturing watermelon seeds to maturity inside cube–shaped glass boxes, Japanese farmers create cube-shaped mature melons that allow for densely packed shipping and storage of the fruit.
The Wyss researchers similarly planted a miniscule gold "seed" inside the hollow cavity of their carefully designed cube–shaped DNA mold and then stimulated it to grow. Using an activating chemical solution, the gold seed grew and expanded to fill all existing space within the DNA framework, resulting in a cuboid nanoparticle with the same dimensions as its mold, with the length, width and height of the particle able to be controlled independently.
Next, researchers fabricated varied 3-D polygonal shapes, spheres, and more ambitious structures, such as a 3-D Y–shaped nanoparticle and another structure comprising a cuboid shape sandwiched between two spheres, proving that structurally diverse nanoparticles could be shaped using complex DNA mold designs.
Given their unthinkably small size, it may come as a surprise that stiff DNA molds are proportionally quite robust and strong, able to withstand the pressures of expanding inorganic materials. Although the team selected gold seedlings to cast their nanoparticles, there is a wide range of inorganic nanoparticles that can be forcibly shaped through this process of DNA nanocasting.
A very useful property is that once cast, these nanoparticles can retain the framework of the DNA mold as an outer coating, enabling additional surface modification with impressive nanoscale precision. These coatings can also help scientists develop highly sensitive, multiplex methods of detecting early stage cancers and genetic diseases by combining the chemical specificity of the DNA with the signal readout of the metal. For particles that would better serve their purpose by being as electrically conducive as possible, such as in very small nanocomputers and electronic circuitry, the DNA framework coating is quickly and easily broken down and removed to produce pure metal wires and connectors.
"The properties of DNA that allow it to self-assemble and encode the building blocks of life have been harnessed, repurposed and reimagined for the nanomanufacturing of inorganic materials," said Don Ingber, Wyss Institute founding director. "This capability should open up entirely new strategies for fields ranging from computer miniaturization to energy and pathogen detection."
Luis Fernando Velásquez-García’s group at MIT’s Microsystems
Technology Laboratories (MTL) develops dense arrays of microscopic cones that
harness electrostatic forces to eject streams of ions.
The technology has a range of promising applications: depositing or etching features onto nanoscale mechanical devices; spinning out nanofibers for use in water filters, body armor, and “smart” textiles; or propulsion systems for fist-sized "nanosatellites."
In the latest issue of the IEEE Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems, Velásquez-García, his graduate students Eric Heubel and Philip Ponce de Leon, and Frances Hill, a postdoc in his group, describe a new prototype array that generates 10 times the ion current per emitter that previous arrays did.
Ion current is a measure of the charge carried by moving ions, which translates directly to the rate at which particles can be ejected. Higher currents thus promise more-efficient manufacturing and more-nimble satellites.
The same prototype also crams 1,900 emitters onto a chip that’s only a centimeter square, quadrupling the array size and emitter density of even the best of its predecessors.
A thick forest of carbon nanotubes covers the surfaces of the emitter. The Journal of Micrelectromechanical Systems “This is a field that benefits from miniaturizing the components, because scaling down emitters implies less power consumption, less bias voltage to operate them, and higher throughput,” says Velásquez-García, a principal research scientist at MTL. “The topic we have been tackling is how we can make these devices operate as close as we can to the theoretical limit and how we can greatly increase the throughput by virtue of multiplexing, with massively parallel devices that operate uniformly.”
When Velásquez-García speaks of a “theoretical limit,” he’s talking about the point at which droplets — clumps of molecules — rather than ions — individual molecules — begin streaming off of the emitters. Among other problems, droplets are heavier, so their ejection velocity is lower, which makes them less useful for etching or satellite propulsion.
The ions ejected by Velásquez-García’s prototype are produced from an ionic salt that’s liquid at room temperature. Surface tension wicks the fluid up the side of the emitters to the tip of the cone, whose narrowness concentrates the electrostatic field. At the tip, the liquid is ionized and, ideally, ejected one molecule at a time.
When the ion current in an emitter gets high enough, droplet formation is inevitable. But earlier emitter arrays — those built both by Velásquez-García’s group and by others — fell well short of that threshold.
Increasing an array’s ion current is a matter of regulating the flow of the ionic salt up the emitters’ sides. To do that, the MIT researchers had previously used black silicon, a form of silicon grown as closely packed bristles. But in the new work, they instead used carbon nanotubes — atom-thick sheets of carbon rolled into cylinders — grown on the slopes of the emitters like trees on a mountainside.
An electrospray emitter, which is covered by a conformal forest of carbon nanotubes. Image: Journal of Micrelectromechanical SystemsAn electrospray emitter, which is covered by a conformal forest of carbon nanotubes. Image: Journal of Micrelectromechanical SystemsBy carefully tailoring the density and height of the nanotubes, the researchers were able to achieve a fluid flow that enabled an operating ion current at very near the theoretical limit.
“We also show that they work uniformly — that each emitter is doing exactly the same thing,” Velásquez-García says. That’s crucial for nanofabrication applications, in which the depth of an etch, or the height of deposits, must be consistent across an entire chip.
To control the nanotubes’ growth, the researchers first cover the emitter array with an ultrathin catalyst film, which is broken into particles by chemical reactions with both the substrate and the environment. Then they expose the array to a plasma rich in carbon. The nanotubes grow up under the catalyst particles, which sit atop them, until the catalyst degrades.
Increasing the emitter density — the other improvement reported in the new paper — was a matter of optimizing existing manufacturing “recipe,” Velásquez-García says.
The emitters, like most nanoscale silicon devices, were produced through photolithography, a process in which patterns are optically transferred to layers of materials deposited on silicon wafers; a plasma then etches the material away according to the pattern.
“The recipe is the gases, power, pressure level, time, and the sequence of the etching,” Velásquez-García says. “We started doing electrospray arrays 15 years ago, and making different generations of devices gave us the know-how to make them better.”
Nanoprinting
Velásquez-García believes that using arrays of emitters to produce nanodevices could have several advantages over photolithography — the technique that produces the arrays themselves.
Because they can operate at room temperature and don’t require a vacuum chamber, the arrays could deposit materials that can’t withstand the extreme conditions of many micro- and nanomanufacturing processes.
And they could eliminate the time-consuming process of depositing new layers of material, exposing them to optical patterns, etching them, and then starting all over again.
“In my opinion, the best nanosystems are going to be done by 3D printing because it would bypass the problems of standard microfabrication,” Velásquez-García says. “It uses prohibitively expensive equipment, which requires a high level of training to operate, and everything is defined in planes. In many applications you want the three-dimensionality: 3D printing is going to make a big difference in the kinds of systems we can put together and the optimization that we can do.”
“Typically the interest of this type of emitter is to be able to emit a beam of ions and not a beam of droplets,” says Herbert Shea, an associate professor in the Microsystems for Space Technologies Laboratory at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. “Using their nanotube forest, they’re able to get the devices to operate in pure ion mode but have a high current typically associated with the droplet mode.”
Shea believes that, at least in the near term, the technology’s most promising application is in spacecraft propulsion. “It would take a lot of effort to make it into a practical micromachining tool, whereas it would take very little effort to use it as propulsion for small spacecraft,” he says. “The reason you’d like to be in ion mode is to have the most efficient conversion of the mass of the propellant into the momentum of the spacecraft.”
Yale West Campus is organized into research institutes and core facilities — all designed to promote collaboration and interdisciplinary dialogue.
Through this partnership, Leica Microsystems gains access to world-class scientists and the latest developments in research applications. Yale and Leica Microsystems will work together to test prototype products and share ideas on how to improve imaging workflows. "We are extremely excited to embark on this journey of discovery with Yale University as our first such partnership in the USA," said Doug Reed, General Manager of Leica Microsystems North America. "This cooperation will provide some of the best scientific minds access to imaging tools previously out of reach, plus allow Leica Microsystems ready access to new ideas from outstanding scientific leaders, which will be used to guide development of tomorrow's innovations."
"It is electrifying to see our two organizations establish this world-class resource. Not only is this partnership aligned with our mission at West Campus of advancing research through innovative collaboration, it also ensures that current top-flight imaging technology is always within reach to all at Yale", says Christopher Incarvito, Ph.D. and Director of Research Operations & Technology at Yale University's West Campus.
"This is just the beginning of what we feel will be a long and discovery-filled relationship between Leica Microsystems and Yale," said Doug Reed, "we cannot wait to get started and invite all interested scientists to attend!"
Celestica Inc., a global leader in the delivery of end-to-end product lifecycle solutions, announced the opening of its new microelectronics laboratory at its headquarters in Toronto, Ontario in Canada. The new facility will enable start-ups, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and large original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to quickly commercialize their latest ideas for miniaturizing electronics products through prototyping to volume production.
"Microelectronics is in demand for high-reliability markets such as healthcare, aerospace, defense, communications and renewable energy. As optics and photonics technologies permeate these high-reliability sectors, it is becoming increasingly more important to miniaturize and cost reduce," said Shawn Blakney, Senior Director, Technology and Innovation, Celestica. "Smaller electronics provide the flexibility for lighter, portable and potentially more affordable devices, a trend that is already proven in the consumer market."
The unique 1100-square foot, ISO Class-6 cleanroom is a controlled environment for temperature, humidity and airborne particles. The laboratory provides new miniaturization solutions using bare die packaging technologies. The goal is to reduce production costs, enhance signal integrity, and improve thermal performance for high-reliability applications.
The location of the laboratory is a strategic choice with Toronto being the largest ICT (Information, Communication and Technology) hub in Canada. The laboratory will significantly bolster the infrastructure for product enablement in Canada and may also be leveraged by global customers looking to commercialize a product. Start ups, SMEs as well as OEMs can now have quick access to talent and the technologies in this facility to bring electronics products to target markets quickly and affordably.
"The new microelectronics laboratory complements our existing capabilities in Toronto including our materials laboratory and surface mount technology manufacturing," added Blakney. "As we look to the future, microelectronics will play an increasing role in technology, and with this new capability, we can help our customers to keep up with the pace of change and stay competitive in their markets."
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