Basic Technology Research Programme
Current exponential rates of technological progress in microelectronics, nanotechnology, photonics and genomics have been achieved by the phenomenal increase in structural and compositional complexity of artifically created materials and devices.
Our highly interdisciplinary consortium, involving researchers at the Universities of Southampton, Nottingham and Manchester, aims to develop a new technique that will allow the fabrication of three-dimensional nanostructures with atomic layer control. We plan to deposit materials such as silicon and gallium arsenide inside 3D nanoscale moulds, or templates.
The technique we will use exploits the properties of supercritical fluids (SCFs), which are neither gas nor liquid but exhibit the properties of both, and as such can be used as clean and simple solvents to carry materials into nanoscale templates. We will develop completely new classes of device structure which cannot be produced by any other means because they are either too complex or their three-dimensional nature means that standard "top-down" lithographic approaches would be too slow and expensive to be useful.