At heart, it's an unbelievably small industry, but a handful of Kiwis have big plans for nanotechnology.
Christchurch-based Nano Cluster Devices says an electrical wiring process it perfected last month - which is fine enough to draw 100,000 maps of New Zealand on a pinhead - will have huge applications.
The nanowires, chief scientist Simon Brown says, can be used to improve microchip production, chemical sensors and photo detectors.
"Nanowire technology is undoubtedly going to be the next big thing. It's going to underpin all kinds of new consumer goods as well as industrial processes," he says.
Nanotechnology - or the building of devices and systems through manipulation of atoms - has a whole range of applications, Brown says, but they're not being put to use, "partly because the methods that people have used to make the wires are not very efficient and they are not commercially practicable".
Brown says the company's lithography and a stencilling technique, for which a patent is pending, may hold economic and technical advantages over existing technologies.
Lithography involves placing a thin photosensitive polymer layer on the surface of a microchip.
Light exposure makes a pattern on the polymer and a development process exposes the substrate, which is then filled with metal.
Brown says other methods have difficulty removing metal that becomes stuck to areas outside the exposed substrate.
Nano Cluster's lead researcher, Jim Partridge, says the stencilling technology improves on current practice and believes that nanowires could replace existing manufacturing techniques and drive the next generation of computer technology.
"The semiconductor industry can see that it has many problems with trying to carry on using the techniques it's using today, so it wants new techniques to make devices through a different route," Partridge says.
"One of the possible routes is by making nanowire-based devices."
"Those [nanowire] building blocks are smaller than the features you can make with the etching process ... and you can ultimately make very small devices."
Brown says the nanowires could also be used to make highly sensitive chemical detectors, and Nano Cluster is in discussions with US companies about possible applications.
Also looking overseas are two Canterbury University students developing nanotechnology for bio-medical use, including diagnosis of cancer and testing of drugs.
James Muys and David Melville, PhD students of biochip cellular analysis and advanced nanolithography respectively, will travel to Padua, Italy, in November to compete for a €300,000 ($524,000) prize in Nanochallenge - a business plan competition aimed at uncovering breakthrough applications.
Muys says direct imaging of biological samples is currently "very rough and very crude and doesn't really exploit the nano-scale imaging".
"With scanning electron [microscopes] you're bombarding the biological sample with electrons, which inevitably causes structural changes ... which is not good when you're wanting to evaluate responses to stimuli," he says.
The duo have developed a process called bioImprint to replicate the cell in as near a living state as possible.
The process creates a "cast" of the biological material, which can then be examined with an atomic microscope without causing damage.
The replica can also be "cleaned" for transfer across borders as a non bio-hazard.
If Muys and Melville win in Padua, they will begin commercial development of bioImprint in Italy, although intellectual property rights will remain with the University of Canterbury.
The duo say discussions are already under way with local venture capitalists.
"If [Italy] doesn't go through," Muys says, "it's looking pretty promising to get some sort of funding to start up a company here in Christchurch."
Little feats
* Christchurch-based Nano Cluster Devices has come up with a technique to make super-small wires that could be used to build next-generation computer chips.
* The process can also be used to make highly sensitive chemical detectors.
* James Muys and David Melville, two Canterbury University PhD students, will compete for a $524,000 prize at a nanotechnology competition in Italy in November and will then look to secure a commercial deal for their bioImprint project.
Thinking small promises big returns
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.