MICROELECTRONIC devices of the future may be grown from the ground up like trees rather than carved into silicon. That’s the possibility raised by the growth of forests of semiconducting “nanotrees”. They have properties that promise to overcome one of the most fundamental problems facing the microelectronics industry – maintaining the quality of signals within devices as they get smaller.
The smallest features that are routinely carved in silicon today are 130 nanometres across. But when electrons pass through these features in microelectronic devices, they tend to be scattered by imperfections in the structure of the material. In large devices the…
