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Researchers develop radios smaller than a grain of sand
August 6, 2008
If you think getting your music from an iPod nano is the cutting edge of compact audio devices, you haven’t heard about the radio smaller than a grain of sand.
Researchers at the University of Illinois and electronics engineers from Northrop Grumman Electronics Systems in Linthicum, MD used microscopic carbon nanotube technology to create a tiny, functional, all-nanotube transistor radio. During testing at Norththrup, the radio was able to receive a traffic report from WBAL-AM (1090), a Baltimore radio station.
The researchers intended to create nanotubes that were higher-performing semi-conductors, and because the radios are too small to be marketable, the innovation is a new way to display the carbon nanotubes that they say are 100,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. The nanotube devices provide all of the active functionality in the radio.
"We were not trying to make the world’s tiniest radios," said John Rogers, a member of the research team and professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois. "The nanotube radios are a demonstration, an important milestone toward building the technology into a form that ultimately would be commercially competitive with entrenched approaches."
The researchers were able to overcome the challenges in controlling geometries, spatial positions, and electronic properties of individual tubes to use the single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) in advanced electronics. To achieve this, hundreds of thousands of nanotubes were set in horizontally aligned arrays to act as a semiconductor material.
The results the researchers produced will be a first step toward practical implementation of SWNTs in high-speed analog devices and RF electronics.
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy, and is featured in an article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Posted by Jessica MacNeil on August 6, 2008 | Comments (0)
