Many technology industry players are involved in projects focusing specifically on nanotechnologies and aimed at defining, evaluating, producing and disseminating reliable and popular technologies, e.g. for the synthesis of nanomaterials.
The bottom-up approach to the synthesis or assembly of nanomaterials is to develop larger functional structures from basic units (atoms, aggregates) using physical, chemical or mechanical processes such as Evaporation condensation technologies, sputtering technologies, sol-gel technologies, enabling the production of nanomaterials from solutions, etc.
For its part, the top-down approach consists of miniaturizing existing structures and thus integrating as many elementary components (e.g. transistors) as possible on a specific surface. This resulted in lithography (optics, X-rays) or ion beam etching technologies that make it possible to stack thin layers of different materials (semiconductors, metals, insulators).
Four years ago, the American technology company IBM announced that over the next five years it would invest around $3 billion in an ambitious project called “7nm and beyond” to prepare for the future of nanoelectronics.
By publishing the research results, the company has just confirmed its determination. The results of this study were recently published in Nature Communications magazine. They show that IBM researchers have succeeded for the first time in electrifying graphene to deposit nanomaterials on wafers with an accuracy of 97%.
Controlling the placement of nanomaterials in the designated areas with an accuracy of less than one micrometer remains one of the greatest difficulties hampering the large-scale integration of these components into the semiconductor industry. Some of the so-called top-down techniques currently used have the disadvantage that they can cause undesirable chemical modifications that could damage the material being deposited.
Other processes, such as the introduction of nanomaterials using electric fields, make it possible to eliminate the chemical treatment element and are therefore considered less destructive. However, they are not free of defects. For example, the above non-chemical treatment process requires the use of conductive electrodes to place nanomaterials, which limits the performance, scalability, and density of integrated electronic devices.
IBM researchers have also developed a technique to install nanomaterials from a solution supported by an electric field with graphene. This hybrid process (bottom-up/top-down) achieves wafer-scale nanometric resolution and opens the door to mass production of nanoelectronic and optoelectronic devices with a wide range of nanomaterials from solutions.