Grazing the Nanograss -

ComputerWorld ^ | October 11, 2004 | Gary H. Anthes

[UnklGene]

Grazing the Nanograss -

Adaptable substance may cool computers and put a zoom lens in your cell phone.

Future Watch by Gary H. Anthes

OCTOBER 11, 2004 (COMPUTERWORLD) - A drop of water glides across the flat surface like quicksilver, moving effortlessly from place to place as the surface is tilted. It's hard to believe that the little bead is water, for it doesn't wet the surface as it races around, seemingly without friction. The little drop in this impromptu laboratory demonstration isn't on an ordinary surface. It's riding on "nanograss," a bed of upright silicon posts a thousand times thinner than a human hair. Bell Labs, the research and development arm of Lucent Technologies Inc., is betting that nanograss will find its way into commercial products ranging from low-friction boat hulls to heat sinks for computer processors and batteries with a shelf life of 25 years. It will be one of the first nanoscale technologies commercialized by Bell Labs and its partner, the New Jersey Nanotechnology Consortium (NJNC).

"Nanograss is a whole new class of structure, where we are nanoengineering the surface of a material," says David Bishop, a research vice president at Bell Labs and president of the NJNC. "By adjusting the area of these posts and their density, and how you pattern them, you can engineer how the fluid interacts with the substrate. So you are not stuck with what nature gave you, and you can do lots of amazing things."

It is also possible to alter the properties of nanograss on the fly by changing the temperature, applying ultrasound or a small voltage, or other means. A voltage builds up an electrical field at the tips of the nanograss, and that changes its wettability through an effect called electrowetting.

That could allow the electrodes and electrolytes in a battery to remain separated until the battery is needed, extending its shelf life indefinitely. Conventional batteries discharge at the rate of 3% to 5% a month, even when not in use. Nanograss batteries will cost less and have far higher power-to-weight ratios, researchers predict.

Bishop says other applications of nanograss include the following:

• Heat sinks for computer processors and other devices. "It's very hard to get high fluid flows through small silicon channels; it kind of jams up," Bishop says. "But nanograss allows much higher fluid flow because the liquid is only interacting with one-hundredth as much surface."

Commercialization of the nanograss heat-sink idea is two to three years away, but Bell Labs is about to sign a contract with a company to develop a "smart" heat sink that can change its cooling properties as needs change, he says. The idea is noteworthy because chip makers have found that heat dissipation is one of the greatest obstacles to making silicon circuits smaller than the current generation, at 90 nanometers.

• Liquid lenses. It's possible to construct tiny, cheap liquid lenses whose focal lengths and other properties can be changed very quickly by the application of electrical fields. Bishop predicts that disposable cameras and cell phones with zoom lenses based on this idea could be available in a year.

• "Liquid photonics." In three to five years, nanograss might also go into switches, power splitters, filters, multiplexers and other devices in order to manipulate light in ways that are difficult to do by conventional means.

"Nanograss is an important technology because it combines a materials breakthrough with electronic properties that enhance the material and allow it to be used as a platform for a slew of applications," says Josh Wolfe, a managing partner at Lux Capital Group LLC, a venture capital firm in New York.

Wolfe says such "hybridization of disciplines" is a defining characteristic of many nanotech applications, and it allows for advancements that would have been impossible in a world where scientists generally concentrated on just one field at a time.

MPhase Technologies Inc. in Norwalk, Conn., is working with Bell Labs and the NJNC at Bell Labs' $400 million "nanofabrication laboratory" in Murray Hill, N.J., to develop nanotech batteries. The parties will share any patents that result. MPhase will produce some batteries itself and will license the technology to other battery makers, says Steve Simon, the company's executive vice president for R&D.

MPhase will make conventional nonrechargeable batteries and "reserved" batteries -- those that don't combine the electrolyte and electrodes until the battery is needed, Simon says. The batteries will be used in military applications in 2006 and in commercial devices, such as cell phones, handheld devices and notebook computers, in about three years. Preliminary benchmark data from mPhase shows that the batteries will have three to four times the power-to-weight ratio of ordinary AA batteries.

[GeronL]

cool stuff...

[The Loan Arranger]

Is that the stuff the Deaniacs were smoking? LOL

[Drammach]

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Science Ping?

[lainde]

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