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Big achievement on tiny project
Published by the Communications and Development Department
25 July 2003
Canterbury University student Jullada Homtientong has created the smallest map of Christchurch ever printed using the latest in nanotechnology.
The map is so small that to the human eye it looks like a speck of dust.
Jullada, who is in her final year studying electrical and computer engineering, printed the map using Electron Beam Lithography (EBL), a technique in which a focused beam of electrons is scanned over a silicon chip coated with a thin polymer layer. Wherever the electron beam exposes the polymer a pattern is formed after a subsequent chemical development process.
The whole of the city of Christchurch is contained in an area about 60 micrometres square – one micrometre is a thousandth of a millimetre – which is small enough to fit on a human hair. The streets themselves are only 50 nanometres wide – one nanometre is a millionth of a millimetre.
Dr Richard Blaikie, the deputy Director of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, said the demonstration showed the power of nanotechnology in being able to create structures with incredible complexity in a very small area.
“This already finds practical application in the manufacture of modern computer chips, in which the dimensions of the wiring is already at about the 100 nanometre scale.
“In the future we will go smaller. The technology is there.”
Dr Blaikie said researchers had already made conducting electrical wire as small as one or two nanometres wide. “That’s the equivalent of putting white lines down the centre of the roads on the map of Christchurch.”
Canterbury University is one of the major partners in the MacDiarmid Institute, a New Zealand Centre of Research Excellence, and much of the institute’s nanotechnology research is based at the University. The institute aims to develop new materials and device technologies to serve the future needs of New Zealand science and technology related industries.
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