Tag Archives: silicon

Nanomedicine and an enhanced uptake of nanoparticles

Leave a reply

It’s nice to know that a step forward has been taken with regard to improving uptake in  nanoparticle-based drug delivery (see my April 27, 2016 posting titled: How many nanoparticle-based drugs does it take to kill a cancer tumour? More than 1% for insight into the difficulties of f nanoparticle-based drug delivery systems).

Here’s the latest move forward in a March 8, 2017 news item on Nanowerk (Note: A link has been removed),

Nanotechnology has become a growing part of medical research in recent years, with scientists feverishly working to see if tiny particles could revolutionize the world of drug delivery.

But many questions remain about how to effectively transport those particles and associated drugs to cells.
In an article published today in Scientific Reports (“Enhanced cellular uptake of size-separated lipophilic silicon nanoparticles”), FSU Associate Professor of Biological Science Steven Lenhert takes a step forward in the understanding of nanoparticles and how they can best be used to deliver drugs.

After conducting a series of experiments, Lenhert and his colleagues found that it may be possible to boost the efficacy of medicine entering target cells via a nanoparticle.

A March 8, 2017 Florida State University news release by Kathleen Haughney, which originated the news item, provides more detail about the research (an international collaboration involving the University of Toronto [Canada] and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology [Germany]),

“We can enhance how cells take them up and make more drugs more potent,” Lenhert said.

Initially, Lenhert and his colleagues from the University of Toronto and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology  wanted to see what happened when they encapsulated silicon nanoparticles in liposomes — or small spherical sacs of molecules — and delivered them to HeLa cells, a standard cancer cell model.

The initial goal was to test the toxicity of silicon-based nanoparticles and get a better understanding of its biological activity.

Silicon is a non-toxic substance and has well-known optical properties that allow their nanostructures to appear fluorescent under an infrared camera, where tissue would be nearly transparent. Scientists believe it has enormous potential as a delivery agent for drugs as well as in medical imaging.

But there are still questions about how silicon behaves at such a small size.

“Nanoparticles change properties as they get smaller, so scientists want to understand the biological activity,” Lenhert said. “For example, how does shape and size affect toxicity?”

Scientists found that 10 out of 18 types of the particles, ranging from 1.5 nanometers to 6 nanometers, were significantly more toxic than crude mixtures of the material.

At first, scientists believed this could be a setback, but they then discovered the reason for the toxicity levels. The more toxic fragments also had enhanced cellular uptake.

That information is more valuable long term, Lenhert said, because it means they could potentially alter nanoparticles to enhance the potency of a given therapeutic.

The work also paves the way for researchers to screen libraries of nanoparticles to see how cells react.

“This is an essential step toward the discovery of novel nanotechnology based therapeutics,” Lenhert said. “There’s big potential here for new therapeutics, but we need to be able to test everything first.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Enhanced cellular uptake of size-separated lipophilic silicon nanoparticles by Aubrey E. Kusi-Appiah, Melanie L. Mastronardi, Chenxi Qian, Kenneth K. Chen, Lida Ghazanfari, Plengchart Prommapan, Christian Kübel, Geoffrey A. Ozin, & Steven Lenhert. Scientific Reports 7, Article number: 43731 (2017) doi:10.1038/srep43731 Published online: 08 March 2017

This paper is open access.

Phagocytosis for a bioelectronic future

Leave a reply

The process by which a cell engulfs matter is known as phagocytosis. One of the best known examples of failed phagocytosis is that of asbestos fibres in the lungs where lung cells have attempted to engulf a fibre that’s just too big and ends up piercing the cell. When enough of the cells are pierced, the person is diagnosed with mesothelioma.

This particular example of phagocytosis is a happier one according to a Dec. 16, 2016 article by Meghan Rosen for ScienceNews,

Human cells can snack on silicon.

Cells grown in the lab devour nano-sized wires of silicon through an engulfing process known as phagocytosis, scientists report December 16 in Science Advances.

Silicon-infused cells could merge electronics with biology, says John Zimmerman, a biophysicist now at Harvard University. “It’s still very early days,” he adds, but “the idea is to get traditional electronic devices working inside of cells.” Such hybrid devices could one day help control cellular behavior, or even replace electronics used for deep brain stimulation, he says.

Scientists have been trying to load electronic parts inside cells for years. One way is to zap holes in cells with electricity, which lets big stuff, like silicon nanowires linked to bulky materials, slip in. Zimmerman, then at the University of Chicago, and colleagues were looking for a simpler technique, something that would let tiny nanowires in easily and could potentially allow them to travel through a person’s bloodstream — like a drug.

A Dec. 22, 2016 University of Chicago news release by Matt Wood provides more detail,

“You can treat it as a non-genetic, synthetic biology platform,” said Bozhi Tian, PhD, assistant professor of chemistry and senior author of the new study. “Traditionally in biology we use genetic engineering and modify genetic parts. Now we can use silicon parts, and silicon can be internalized. You can target those silicon parts to specific parts of the cell and modulate that behavior with light.”

In the new study, Tian and his team show how cells consume or internalize the nanowires through phagocytosis, the same process they use to engulf and ingest nutrients and other particles in their environment. The nanowires are simply added to cell media, the liquid solution the cells live in, the same way you might administer a drug, and the cells take it from there. Eventually, the goal would be to inject them into the bloodstream or package them into a pill.

Once inside, the nanowires can interact directly with individual parts of the cell, organelles like the mitochondria, nucleus and cytoskeletal filaments. Researchers can then stimulate the nanowires with light to see how individual components of the cell respond, or even change the behavior of the cell. They can last up to two weeks inside the cell before biodegrading.

…

Seeing how individual parts of a cell respond to stimulation could give researchers insight into how medical treatments that use electrical stimulation work at a more detailed level. For instance, deep brain stimulation helps treat tremors from movement disorders like Parkinson’s disease by sending electrical signals to areas of the brain. Doctors know it works at the level of tissues and brain structures, but seeing how individual components of nerve cells react to these signals could help fine tune and improve the treatment.

The experiments in the study used umbilical vascular endothelial cells, which make up blood vessel linings in the umbilical cord. These cells readily took up the nanowires, but others, like cardiac muscle cells, did not. Knowing that some cells consume the wires and some don’t could also prove useful in experimental settings and give researchers more ways to target specific cell types.

Tian and his team manufactures the nanowires in their lab with a chemical vapor deposition system that grows the silicon structures to different specifications. They can adjust size, shape, and electrical properties as needed, or even add defects on purpose for testing. They can also make wires with porous surfaces that could deliver drugs or genetic material to the cells. The process gives them a variety of ways to manipulate the properties of the nanowires for research.

Seeing how individual parts of a cell respond to stimulation could give researchers insight into how medical treatments that use electrical stimulation work at a more detailed level. For instance, deep brain stimulation helps treat tremors from movement disorders like Parkinson’s disease by sending electrical signals to areas of the brain. Doctors know it works at the level of tissues and brain structures, but seeing how individual components of nerve cells react to these signals could help fine tune and improve the treatment.

The experiments in the study used umbilical vascular endothelial cells, which make up blood vessel linings in the umbilical cord. These cells readily took up the nanowires, but others, like cardiac muscle cells, did not. Knowing that some cells consume the wires and some don’t could also prove useful in experimental settings and give researchers more ways to target specific cell types.

Tian and his team manufactures the nanowires in their lab with a chemical vapor deposition system that grows the silicon structures to different specifications. They can adjust size, shape, and electrical properties as needed, or even add defects on purpose for testing. They can also make wires with porous surfaces that could deliver drugs or genetic material to the cells. The process gives them a variety of ways to manipulate the properties of the nanowires for research.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Cellular uptake and dynamics of unlabeled freestanding silicon nanowires by John F. Zimmerman, Ramya Parameswaran, Graeme Murray, Yucai Wang, Michael Burke, and Bozhi Tian. Science Advances  16 Dec 2016: Vol. 2, no. 12, e1601039 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1601039

This paper appears to be open access.

Steering a synthetic nanorobot using light

Leave a reply

This news comes from the University of Hong Kong. A Nov. 8, 2016 news item on Nanowerk throws some light on the matter (Note: A link has been removed),

A team of researchers led by Dr Jinyao Tang of the Department of Chemistry, the University of Hong Kong, has developed the world’s first light-seeking synthetic Nano robot. With size comparable to a blood cell, those tiny robots have the potential to be injected into patients’ bodies, helping surgeons to remove tumors and enabling more precise engineering of targeted medications. The findings have been published in October [2016] earlier in leading scientific journal Nature Nanotechnology (“Programmable artificial phototactic microswimmer”).

An Oct. 24, 2016 University of Hong Kong press release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, expands on the theme,

It has been a dream in science fiction for decades that tiny robots can fundamentally change our daily life. The famous science fiction  movie “Fantastic  Voyage” is a very good example, with a group of scientists driving their miniaturized nano-submarine inside human body to repair a damaged brain. In the film “Terminator  2,” billions of nanorobots were assembled into the amazing shapeshifting body: the T-1000. In the real world, it is quite challenging to make and design a sophisticated nanorobot with advanced functions.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2016 was awarded to three scientists for “the design and synthesis of molecular machines.” They developed a set of mechanical components at molecular scale which may be  assembled into  more complicated nanomachines  to  manipulate single  molecule such as DNA or proteins in the future. The development of tiny nanoscale machines for biomedical applications has been a major trend of scientific research in recent years. Any breakthroughs will potentially open the door to new knowledge and treatments of diseases and development of new drugs.

One difficulty in nanorobot design is to make these nanostructures sense and respond to the environment. Given each nanorobot is only a few micrometer in size which is ~50 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair, it  is very difficult  to  squeeze  normal electronic sensors and circuits into  nanorobots with reasonable price. Currently, the only method to remotely control nanorobots is to  incorporate tiny magnetic inside the nanorobot and guide the motion via external magnetic field.

The  nanorobot developed by Dr Tang’s team use light as the propelling  force, and is the first research team globally to explore the light-guided nanorobots and demonstrated its feasibility and effectiveness. In their paper published in Nature  Nanotechnology, Dr Tang’s team  demonstrated  the  unprecedented ability of these light-controlled nanorobots as they are “dancing”  or even spell a word under light control. With a novel  nanotree structure, the nanorobots can respond to the light shining on it like  moths  being drawn to flames. Dr Tang described the motions as if “they can “see” the light and drive itself towards it”.

The team gained inspiration from natural green algae
for the nanorobot design. In nature, some green algae have evolved  with  the  ability  of  sensing  light  around  it.  Even just a single cell, these green  algae can sense the intensity of light and swim  towards the light source for photosynthesis. Dr  Jinyao  Tang’s team successfully developed the nanorobots after over three years’ efforts. With a novel nanotree structure, they are composed of two  common and low-price semiconductor materials: silicon  and titanium oxide. During  the  synthesis, silicon  and titanium oxide are shaped into nanowire and then further arranged into a tiny nanotree heterostructure.

Dr Tang said: “Although the current nanorobot cannot be used for disease treatment yet, we are working on the next generation nanorobotic system which is more efficient and biocompatible.”

“Light is a more effective option to communicate between microscopic world and macroscopic world. We can conceive that more complicated instructions can be sent to nanorobots which provide scientists with a new tool to further develop more functions into nanorobot and get us one step closer to daily life applications,” he added.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Programmable artificial phototactic microswimmer by Baohu Dai, Jizhuang Wang, Ze Xiong, Xiaojun Zhan, Wei Dai, Chien-Cheng Li, Shien-Ping Feng, & Jinyao Tang.  Nature Nanotechnology (2016)  doi:10.1038/nnano.2016.187 Published online 17 October 2016

So, this ‘bot’ seems to be a microbot or microrobot with some nanoscale features. In any event, the paper is behind a paywall.

US white paper on neuromorphic computing (or the nanotechnology-inspired Grand Challenge for future computing)

Leave a reply

The US has embarked on a number of what is called “Grand Challenges.” I first came across the concept when reading about the Bill and Melinda Gates (of Microsoft fame) Foundation. I gather these challenges are intended to provide funding for research that advances bold visions.

There is the US National Strategic Computing Initiative established on July 29, 2015 and its first anniversary results were announced one year to the day later. Within that initiative a nanotechnology-inspired Grand Challenge for Future Computing was issued and, according to a July 29, 2016 news item on Nanowerk, a white paper on the topic has been issued (Note: A link has been removed),

Today [July 29, 2016), Federal agencies participating in the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) released a white paper (pdf) describing the collective Federal vision for the emerging and innovative solutions needed to realize the Nanotechnology-Inspired Grand Challenge for Future Computing.

The grand challenge, announced on October 20, 2015, is to “create a new type of computer that can proactively interpret and learn from data, solve unfamiliar problems using what it has learned, and operate with the energy efficiency of the human brain.” The white paper describes the technical priorities shared by the agencies, highlights the challenges and opportunities associated with these priorities, and presents a guiding vision for the research and development (R&D) needed to achieve key technical goals. By coordinating and collaborating across multiple levels of government, industry, academia, and nonprofit organizations, the nanotechnology and computer science communities can look beyond the decades-old approach to computing based on the von Neumann architecture and chart a new path that will continue the rapid pace of innovation beyond the next decade.

A July 29, 2016 US National Nanotechnology Coordination Office news release, which originated the news item, further and succinctly describes the contents of the paper,

“Materials and devices for computing have been and will continue to be a key application domain in the field of nanotechnology. As evident by the R&D topics highlighted in the white paper, this challenge will require the convergence of nanotechnology, neuroscience, and computer science to create a whole new paradigm for low-power computing with revolutionary, brain-like capabilities,” said Dr. Michael Meador, Director of the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office. …

The white paper was produced as a collaboration by technical staff at the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Intelligence Community. …

The white paper titled “A Federal Vision for Future Computing: A Nanotechnology-Inspired Grand Challenge” is 15 pp. and it offers tidbits such as this (Note: Footnotes not included),

A new materials base may be needed for future electronic hardware. While most of today’s electronics use silicon, this approach is unsustainable if billions of disposable and short-lived sensor nodes are needed for the coming Internet-of-Things (IoT). To what extent can the materials base for the implementation of future information technology (IT) components and systems support sustainability through recycling and bio-degradability? More sustainable materials, such as compostable or biodegradable systems (polymers, paper, etc.) that can be recycled or reused,  may play an important role. The potential role for such alternative materials in the fabrication of integrated systems needs to be explored as well. [p. 5]

…

The basic architecture of computers today is essentially the same as those built in the 1940s—the von Neumann architecture—with separate compute, high-speed memory, and high-density storage components that are electronically interconnected. However, it is well known that continued performance increases using this architecture are not feasible in the long term, with power density constraints being one of the fundamental roadblocks.7 Further advances in the current approach using multiple cores, chip multiprocessors, and associated architectures are plagued by challenges in software and programming models. Thus,  research and development is required in radically new and different computing architectures involving processors, memory, input-output devices, and how they behave and are interconnected. [p. 7]

…

Neuroscience research suggests that the brain is a complex, high-performance computing system with low energy consumption and incredible parallelism. A highly plastic and flexible organ, the human brain is able to grow new neurons, synapses, and connections to cope with an ever-changing environment. Energy efficiency, growth, and flexibility occur at all scales, from molecular to cellular, and allow the brain, from early to late stage, to never stop learning and to act with proactive intelligence in both familiar and novel situations. Understanding how these mechanisms work and cooperate within and across scales has the potential to offer tremendous technical insights and novel engineering frameworks for materials, devices, and systems seeking to perform efficient and autonomous computing. This research focus area is the most synergistic with the national BRAIN Initiative. However, unlike the BRAIN Initiative, where the goal is to map the network connectivity of the brain, the objective here is to understand the nature, methods, and mechanisms for computation,  and how the brain performs some of its tasks. Even within this broad paradigm,  one can loosely distinguish between neuromorphic computing and artificial neural network (ANN) approaches. The goal of neuromorphic computing is oriented towards a hardware approach to reverse engineering the computational architecture of the brain. On the other hand, ANNs include algorithmic approaches arising from machinelearning,  which in turn could leverage advancements and understanding in neuroscience as well as novel cognitive, mathematical, and statistical techniques. Indeed, the ultimate intelligent systems may as well be the result of merging existing ANN (e.g., deep learning) and bio-inspired techniques. [p. 8]

As government documents go, this is quite readable.

For anyone interested in learning more about the future federal plans for computing in the US, there is a July 29, 2016 posting on the White House blog celebrating the first year of the US National Strategic Computing Initiative Strategic Plan (29 pp. PDF; awkward but that is the title).

Unleashing graphene electronics potential with a trio of 2D nanomaterials

Leave a reply

Graphene has excited a great deal of interest, especially with regard to its application in the field of electronics. However, it seems that graphene may need a little help from its friends, tantalum sulfide and boron nitride, according to a July 6, 2016 news item on ScienceDaily,

Graphene has emerged as one of the most promising two-dimensional crystals, but the future of electronics may include two other nanomaterials, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California, Riverside and the University of Georgia.

In research published Monday (July 4 [2016]) in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, the researchers described the integration of three very different two-dimensional (2D) materials to yield a simple, compact, and fast voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) device. A VCO is an electronic oscillator whose oscillation frequency is controlled by a voltage input.

Titled “An integrated Tantalum Sulfide–Boron Nitride–Graphene Oscillator: A Charge-Density-Wave Device Operating at Room Temperature,” the paper describes the development of the first useful device that exploits the potential of charge-density waves to modulate an electrical current through a 2D material. The new technology could become an ultralow power alternative to conventional silicon-based devices, which are used in thousands of applications from computers to clocks to radios. The thin, flexible nature of the device would make it ideal for use in wearable technologies.

A July 5, 2016 University of California at Riverside (UCR) news release (also on EurekAlert) by Sarah Nightingale, which originated the news item, expands on the theme,

Graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms that exhibits exceptional electrical and thermal conductivities, shows promise as a successor to silicon-based transistors. However, its application has been limited by its inability to function as a semiconductor, which is critical for the ‘on-off’ switching operations performed by electronic components.

To overcome this shortfall, the researchers turned to another 2D nanomaterial, Tantalum Sulfide (TaS2). They showed that voltage-induced changes in the atomic structure of the ‘1T prototype’ of TaS2 enable it to function as an electrical switch at room temperature–a requirement for practical applications.

“There are many charge-density wave materials that have interesting electrical switching properties. However, most of them reveal these properties at very low temperature only. The particular polytype of TaS2 that we used can have abrupt changes in resistance above room temperature. That made a crucial difference,” said Alexander Balandin, UC presidential chair professor of electrical and computer engineering in UCR’s Bourns College of Engineering, who led the research team.

To protect the TaS2 from environmental damage, the researchers coated it with another 2D material, hexagonal boron nitrate, to prevent oxidation. By pairing the boron nitride-capped TaS2 with graphene, the team constructed a three-layer VCO that could pave the way for post-silicon electronics. In the proposed design, graphene functions as an integrated tunable load resistor, which enables precise voltage control of the current and VCO frequency. The prototype UCR devices operated at MHz frequency used in radios, and the extremely fast physical processes that define the device functionality allow for the operation frequency to increase all the way to THz.

Balandin said the integrated system is the first example of a functional voltage-controlled oscillator device comprising 2D materials that operates at room temperature.

“It is difficult to compete with silicon, which has been used and improved for the past 50 years. However, we believe our device shows a unique integration of three very different 2D materials, which utilizes the intrinsic properties of each of these materials. The device can potentially become a low-power alternative to conventional silicon technologies in many different applications,” Balandin said.

The electronic function of graphene envisioned in the proposed 2D device overcomes the problem associated with the absence of the energy band gap, which so far prevented graphene’s use as the transistor channel material. The extremely high thermal conductivity of graphene comes as an additional benefit in the device structure, by facilitating heat removal. The unique heat conduction properties of graphene were experimentally discovered and theoretically explained in 2008 by Balandin’s group at UCR. The Materials Research Society recognized this groundbreaking achievement by awarding Balandin the MRS Medal in 2013.

The Balandin group also demonstrated the first integrated graphene heat spreaders for high-power transistors and light-emitting diodes. “In those applications, graphene was used exclusively as heat conducting material. Its thermal conductivity was the main property. In the present device, we utilize both electrical and thermal conductivity of graphene,” Balandin added.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

A charge-density-wave oscillator based on an integrated tantalum disulfide–boron nitride–graphene device operating at room temperature by Guanxiong Liu, Bishwajit Debnath, Timothy R. Pope, Tina T. Salguero, Roger K. Lake, & Alexander A. Balandin. Nature Nanotechnology (2016) doi:10.1038/nnano.2016.108 Published online 04 July 2016

This paper is behind a paywall.

IBM, the Cognitive Era, and carbon nanotube electronics

Leave a reply

IBM has a storied position in the field of nanotechnology due to the scanning tunneling microscope developed in the company’s laboratories. It was a Nobel Prize-winning breakthough which provided the impetus for nanotechnology applied research. Now, an Oct. 1, 2015 news item on Nanowerk trumpets another IBM breakthrough,

IBM Research today [Oct. 1, 2015] announced a major engineering breakthrough that could accelerate carbon nanotubes replacing silicon transistors to power future computing technologies.

IBM scientists demonstrated a new way to shrink transistor contacts without reducing performance of carbon nanotube devices, opening a pathway to dramatically faster, smaller and more powerful computer chips beyond the capabilities of traditional semiconductors.

While the Oct. 1, 2015 IBM news release, which originated the news item, does go on at length there’s not much technical detail (see the second to last paragraph in the excerpt for the little they do include) about the research breakthrough (Note: Links have been removed),

IBM’s breakthrough overcomes a major hurdle that silicon and any semiconductor transistor technologies face when scaling down. In any transistor, two things scale: the channel and its two contacts. As devices become smaller, increased contact resistance for carbon nanotubes has hindered performance gains until now. These results could overcome contact resistance challenges all the way to the 1.8 nanometer node – four technology generations away. [emphasis mine]

Carbon nanotube chips could greatly improve the capabilities of high performance computers, enabling Big Data to be analyzed faster, increasing the power and battery life of mobile devices and the Internet of Things, and allowing cloud data centers to deliver services more efficiently and economically.

Silicon transistors, tiny switches that carry information on a chip, have been made smaller year after year, but they are approaching a point of physical limitation. With Moore’s Law running out of steam, shrinking the size of the transistor – including the channels and contacts – without compromising performance has been a vexing challenge troubling researchers for decades.

IBM has previously shown that carbon nanotube transistors can operate as excellent switches at channel dimensions of less than ten nanometers – the equivalent to 10,000 times thinner than a strand of human hair and less than half the size of today’s leading silicon technology. IBM’s new contact approach overcomes the other major hurdle in incorporating carbon nanotubes into semiconductor devices, which could result in smaller chips with greater performance and lower power consumption.

Earlier this summer, IBM unveiled the first 7 nanometer node silicon test chip [emphasis mine], pushing the limits of silicon technologies and ensuring further innovations for IBM Systems and the IT industry. By advancing research of carbon nanotubes to replace traditional silicon devices, IBM is paving the way for a post-silicon future and delivering on its $3 billion chip R&D investment announced in July 2014.

“These chip innovations are necessary to meet the emerging demands of cloud computing, Internet of Things and Big Data systems,” said Dario Gil, vice president of Science & Technology at IBM Research. “As silicon technology nears its physical limits, new materials, devices and circuit architectures must be ready to deliver the advanced technologies that will be required by the Cognitive Computing era. This breakthrough shows that computer chips made of carbon nanotubes will be able to power systems of the future sooner than the industry expected.”

A New Contact for Carbon Nanotubes

Carbon nanotubes represent a new class of semiconductor materials that consist of single atomic sheets of carbon rolled up into a tube. The carbon nanotubes form the core of a transistor device whose superior electrical properties promise several generations of technology scaling beyond the physical limits of silicon.

Electrons in carbon transistors can move more easily than in silicon-based devices, and the ultra-thin body of carbon nanotubes provide additional advantages at the atomic scale. Inside a chip, contacts are the valves that control the flow of electrons from metal into the channels of a semiconductor. As transistors shrink in size, electrical resistance increases within the contacts, which impedes performance. Until now, decreasing the size of the contacts on a device caused a commensurate drop in performance – a challenge facing both silicon and carbon nanotube transistor technologies.

IBM researchers had to forego traditional contact schemes and invented a metallurgical process akin to microscopic welding that chemically binds the metal atoms to the carbon atoms at the ends of nanotubes. This ‘end-bonded contact scheme’ allows the contacts to be shrunken down to below 10 nanometers without deteriorating performance of the carbon nanotube devices.

“For any advanced transistor technology, the increase in contact resistance due to the decrease in the size of transistors becomes a major performance bottleneck,” Gil added. “Our novel approach is to make the contact from the end of the carbon nanotube, which we show does not degrade device performance. This brings us a step closer to the goal of a carbon nanotube technology within the decade.”

Every once in a while, the size gets to me and a 1.8nm node is amazing. As for IBM’s 7nm chip, which was previewed this summer, there’s more about that in my July 15, 2015 posting.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the IBM paper,

End-bonded contacts for carbon nanotube transistors with low, size-independent resistance by Qing Cao, Shu-Jen Han, Jerry Tersoff, Aaron D. Franklin†, Yu Zhu, Zhen Zhang‡, George S. Tulevski, Jianshi Tang, and Wilfried Haensch. Science 2 October 2015: Vol. 350 no. 6256 pp. 68-72 DOI: 10.1126/science.aac8006

This paper is behind a paywall.

Wearable solar panels with perovskite

Leave a reply

There was a bit of a flutter online in late July 2014 about solar cell research and perovskite, a material that could replace silicon therefore making solar cells more affordable, which hopefully would lead to greater adoption of the technology. Happily, the publishers of the study seem to have reissued their news release (h/t Aug. 11, 2014 news item on Nanwerk).

From the Wiley online press release Nr. 29/2014,

Textile solar cells are an ideal power source for small electronic devices incorporated into clothing. In the journal Angewandte Chemie, Chinese scientists have now introduced novel solar cells in the form of fibers that can be woven into a textile. The flexible, coaxial cells are based on a perovskite material and carbon nanotubes; they stand out due to their excellent energy conversion efficiency of 3.3 % and their low production cost.

The dilemma for solar cells: they are either inexpensive and inefficient, or they have a reasonable efficiency and are very expensive. One solution may come from solar cells made of perovskite materials, which are less expensive than silicon and do not require any expensive additives. Perovskites are materials with a special crystal structure that is like that of perovskite, a calcium titanate. These structures are often semiconductors and absorb light relatively efficiently. Most importantly, they can move electrons excited by light for long distances within the crystal lattice before they return to their energetic ground state and take up a solid position – a property that is very important in solar cells.

A team led by Hisheng Peng at Fudan University in Shanghai has now developed perovskite solar cells in the form of flexible fibers that can be woven into electronic textiles. Their production process is relatively simple and inexpensive because it uses a solution-based process to build up the layers.

The anode is a fine stainless steel wire coated with a compact n-semiconducting titanium dioxide layer. A layer of porous nanocrystalline titanium dioxide is deposited on top of this. This provides a large surface area for the subsequent deposition of the perovskite material CH3NH3PbI3. This is followed by a layer made of a special organic material. Finally a transparent layer of aligned carbon nanotubes is continuously wound over the whole thing to act as the cathode. The resulting fiber is so fine and flexible that it can be woven into textiles.

The perovskite layer absorbs light, that excites electrons and sets them free, causing a charge separation between the electrons and the formally positively charged “holes” The electrons enter the conducting band of the compact titanium dioxide layer and move to the anode. The “holes” are captured by the organic layer. The large surface area and the high electrical conductivity of the carbon nanotube cathode aid in the rapid conduction of the charges with high photoelectric currents. The fiber solar cell can attain an energy conversion efficiency of 3.3 %, exceeding that of all previous coaxial fiber solar cells made with either dyes or polymers.

Here’s an image used in the press release illustrating the new fiber,

[downloaded from http://www.wiley-vch.de/vch/journals/2002/press/201429press.pdf]

[downloaded from http://www.wiley-vch.de/vch/journals/2002/press/201429press.pdf]

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Integrating Perovskite Solar Cells into a Flexible Fiber by Longbin Qiu, Jue Deng, Xin Lu, Zhibin Yang, and Prof. Huisheng Peng. Angewandte Chemie International Edition DOI: 10.1002/anie.201404973 Article first published online: 22 JUL 2014

© 2014 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

This paper is behind a paywall.

I found a second item about perovskite and solar cells in a May 16, 2014 article by Vicki Marshall for Chemistry World which discussed some research in the UK (Note: Links have been removed),

A lead-free and non-toxic alternative to current perovskite solar-cell technology has been reported by researchers in the UK: tin halide perovskite solar cells. They are also cheaper to manufacture than the silicon solar cells currently dominating the market.

Nakita Noel, part of Henry Snaith’s research team at the University of Oxford, describes how perovskite materials have caused a bit of a whirlwind since they came out in 2009: ‘Everybody that’s working in the solar community is looking to beat silicon.’ Despite the high efficiency of conventional crystalline silicon solar cells (around 20%), high production and installation costs decrease their economic feasibility and widespread use.

The challenge to find a cheaper alternative led to the development of perovskite-based solar cells, as organic–inorganic metal trihalide perovskites have both abundant and cheap starting materials. However, the presence of lead in some semiconductors could create toxicology issues in the future. As Noel puts it ‘every conference you present at somebody is bound to put up their hand and ask “What about the lead – isn’t this toxic?”’

…

Brian Hardin, co-founder of PLANT PV, US, and an expert in new materials for photovoltaic cells, says the study ‘should be considered a seminal work on alternative perovskites and is extremely valuable to the field as they look to better understand how changes in chemistry affect solar cell performance and stability.’

Here’s a link to and a citation for the UK researchers’ paper,

Lead-free organic–inorganic tin halide perovskites for photovoltaic applications by Nakita K. Noel, Samuel D. Stranks, Antonio Abate, Christian Wehrenfennig, Simone Guarnera, Amir-Abbas Haghighirad, Aditya Sadhana, Giles E. Eperon, Sandeep K. Pathak, Michael B. Johnston, Annamaria Petrozza, Laura M. Herza, and Henry J. Snaith. Energy Environ. Sci., 2014, Advance Article DOI: 10.1039/C4EE01076K First published online 01 May 2014

This article was open access until June 27, 2014 but now it is behind a paywall.

I notice there’s no mention of lead in the materials describing the research paper from the Chinese scientists. Perhaps they were working with lead-free materials.

Table salt, acting as a heat scavenger, enables cheaper silicon nanostructures

Leave a reply

Recyclable, easily obtained, and inexpensive, there’s a magic ingredient which could make producing silicon nanostructures easier and cheaper according an Aug. 8, 2013 news item on Nanowerk,

Chemists at Oregon State University have identified a compound that could significantly reduce the cost and potentially enable the mass commercial production of silicon nanostructures – materials that have huge potential in everything from electronics to biomedicine and energy storage.

This extraordinary compound is called table salt.

The Aug. 8, 2013 Oregon State University news release, which originated the news item, describes the principle at work and possible applications for the technique,

By melting and absorbing heat at a critical moment during a “magnesiothermic reaction,” the salt prevents the collapse of the valuable nanostructures that researchers are trying to create. The molten salt can then be washed away by dissolving it in water, and it can be recycled and used again.

The concept, surprising in its simplicity, should open the door to wider use of these remarkable materials that have stimulated scientific research all over the world.

“This could be what it takes to open up an important new industry,” said David Xiulei Ji, an assistant professor of chemistry in the OSU College of Science. “There are methods now to create silicon nanostructures, but they are very costly and can only produce tiny amounts.

“The use of salt as a heat scavenger in this process should allow the production of high-quality silicon nanostructures in large quantities at low cost,” he said. “If we can get the cost low enough many new applications may emerge.”

Silicon, the second most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, has already created a revolution in electronics. But silicon nanostructures, which are complex structures much smaller than a speck of dust, have potential that goes far beyond the element itself.

Uses are envisioned in photonics, biological imaging, sensors, drug delivery, thermoelectric materials that can convert heat into electricity, and energy storage.

Batteries are one of the most obvious and possibly first applications that may emerge from this field, Ji said. It should be possible with silicon nanostructures to create batteries – for anything from a cell phone to an electric car – that last nearly twice as long before they need recharging.

Existing technologies to make silicon nanostructures are costly, and simpler technologies in the past would not work because they required such high temperatures. Ji developed a methodology that mixed sodium chloride and magnesium with diatomaceous earth, a cheap and abundant form of silicon.

When the temperature reached 801 degrees centigrade, the salt melted and absorbed heat in the process. This basic chemical concept – a solid melting into a liquid absorbs heat – kept the nanostructure from collapsing.

The sodium chloride did not contaminate or otherwise affect the reaction, researchers said. Scaling reactions such as this up to larger commercial levels should be feasible, they said.

The study also created, for the first time with this process, nanoporous composite materials of silicon and germanium. These could have wide applications in semiconductors, thermoelectric materials and electrochemical energy devices.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the published paper,

Efficient Fabrication of Nanoporous Si and Si/Ge Enabled by a Heat Scavenger in Magnesiothermic Reactions by Wei Luo, Xingfeng Wang, Colin Meyers, Nick Wannenmacher, Weekit Sirisaksoontorn, Michael M. Lerner & Xiulei Ji. Scientific Reports 3, Article number: 2222 doi:10.1038/srep02222 Published 17 July 2013

This article is open access.

Shake hands with Sacha, a robot controlled by carbon nanotube transistors

Leave a reply

Since we use computer chips built from silicon in any number devices including robots, the announcement of a robot controlled by the first computer chip built entirely of a material other silicon bears notice. From the Mar. 15, 2013 news item on Nanowerk (Note: Links have been removed),

A group of Stanford researchers recently debuted the first robot controlled by a computer chip built entirely from carbon nanotube transistors, which many scientists predict may eventually replace silicon.

While scientists have produced simple demonstrations of working carbon nanotube circuit components in the past, the Stanford team, led by Professor of Electrical Engineering Philip Wong and Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Subhasish Mitra Ph.D. ’00, was able to demonstrate an actual subsystem composed entirely of the material.

The news item was originated by a Mar. 7, 2013 article by Nikhita Obeegadoo for the Stanford Daily, where she noted,

The project was presented in the form of a robot named Sacha at the 2013 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (“Sacha, the Stanford Carbon Nanotube Controlled Handshaking Robot”), which was held in San Francisco. According to Mitra, the robot was created to demonstrate the development of a system that can function despite the errors caused by inherently imperfect nanotubes, which have posed issues for research teams working with carbon nanotubes in the past.

…

“Through several generations of technology, devices keep getting smaller and denser, and silicon will no longer be the best material for the purpose in about ten years,” Guha [Supratik Guha, director of physical sciences at IBM’s Yorktown Heights Research Center] said. “For needs that are close to atomic dimensions, carbon nanotubes have just the right shape and the right electrical behavior.”

Eric Juma on his eponymous blog offers more insight into the project in his Mar. 16, 2013 posting,

… The robot contained a carbon nanotube capacitor, a device found in many touchscreens, connected to another nanotube circuit, which turned the analog signal from the capacitor into a digital signal, which was transmitted to the microprocessor that contained CNT transistors. The microporcessor then sent a signal to a motor on the hand of the robot, which shook the person’s hand that touched the capacitors embedded in it.

This is not the first example of carbon nanotube circuitry, but it is the first example of CNTs being produced at mass for a microprocessor and circuit that were integrated. This advancement showed that it is possible to produce mass amounts of CNTs and have them integrate succesfully into a complex system. Although the size of the CNTs in this system are far from the optimal size of 10nm, it is a good starting point, and the nanotubes still can be much further refined.

Carbon nanotubes, although perfect in theory for microprocessors, present new challenges for engineers. The greatest challenge is the actual integration of CNTs into circuitry. Nanotubes often force themselves into a tangled position, which can cause circuits to fail without warning.

Juma gives a good explanation for why there is so much interest in carbon nanotubes in the field of electronics and he provides links to more information about it all. (There’s a video about carbon nanotubes and their various shapes and structures in my Mar. 15, 2013 posting about them.)

Sacha will be seen (or perhaps the work will simply be presented by Max Shulaker?) next in Switzerland at a Mar. 25, 2013 workshop (FED ’13; Functionality-Enhanced Devices Workshop) at the EPFl (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

Spinach + Silicon = Green Power

Leave a reply

I wouldn’t expect that anyone will be turning their spinach salads into hybrid solar cells anytime soon despite what scientists at Vanderbilt University (Tennessee) have achieved. From the Sept. 4, 2012 news release on EurekAlert,

An interdisciplinary team of researchers at Vanderbilt University have developed a way to combine the photosynthetic protein that converts light into electrochemical energy in spinach with silicon, the material used in solar cells, in a fashion that produces substantially more electrical current than has been reported by previous “biohybrid” solar cells.

Here’s an illustration of the concept provided by Vanderbilt University,

(Julie Turner/Vanderbilt)

According to the Sept. 4, 2012 Vanderbilt University news release , the researchers were trying exploit a feature of a protein found in spinach (and other plants),

More than 40 years ago, scientists discovered that one of the proteins involved in photosynthesis, called Photosystem 1 (PS1), continued to function when it was extracted from plants like spinach. Then they determined PS1 converts sunlight into electrical energy with nearly 100 percent efficiency, compared to conversion efficiencies of less than 40 percent achieved by manmade devices. This prompted various research groups around the world to begin trying to use PS1 to create more efficient solar cells.

…

When a PS1 protein exposed to light, it absorbs the energy in the photons and uses it to free electrons and transport them to one side of the protein. That creates regions of positive charge, called holes, which move to the opposite side of the protein.

In a leaf, all the PS1 proteins are aligned. But in the protein layer on the device, individual proteins are oriented randomly. Previous modeling work indicated that this was a major problem. When the proteins are deposited on a metallic substrate, those that are oriented in one direction provide electrons that the metal collects while those that are oriented in the opposite direction pull electrons out of the metal in order to fill the holes that they produce. As a result, they produce both positive and negative currents that cancel each other out to leave a very small net current flow.

The problem with using a metallic substrate was addressed by using and ‘doping’ silicon (from the Vanderbilt University news release),

The Vanderbilt researchers report that their PS1/silicon combination produces nearly a milliamp (850 microamps) of current per square centimeter at 0.3 volts. That is nearly two and a half times more current than the best level reported previously from a biohybrid cell. The reason this combo works so well is because the electrical properties of the silicon substrate have been tailored to fit those of the PS1 molecule. This is done by implanting electrically charge atoms in the silicon to alter its electrical properties: a process called “doping.” In this case, the protein worked extremely well with silicon doped with positive charges and worked poorly with negatively doped silicon.

To make the device, the researchers extracted PS1 from spinach into an aqueous solution and poured the mixture on the surface of a p-doped silicon wafer. Then they put the wafer in a vacuum chamber in order to evaporate the water away leaving a film of protein. They found that the optimum thickness was about one micron, about 100 PS1 molecules thick.

Here’s a graph illustrating the improvement (larger version available here),

Graph shows the dramatic increase in electrical current that Vanderbilt researchers have managed to produce from biohybrid solar cells. (Courtesy of Cliffel Lab/Vanderbilt University)

Encouraging news overall but the researchers still have more work to do (from the Vanderbilt University news release),

This combination produces current levels almost 1,000 times higher than we were able to achieve by depositing the protein on various types of metals. It also produces a modest increase in voltage,” said David Cliffel, associate professor of chemistry, who collaborated on the project with Kane Jennings, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering.

“If we can continue on our current trajectory of increasing voltage and current levels, we could reach the range of mature solar conversion technologies in three years.”

The researchers’ next step is to build a functioning PS1-silicon solar cell using this new design. Jennings has an Environmental Protection Agency award that will allow a group of undergraduate engineering students to build the prototype. The students won the award at the National Sustainable Design Expo in April based on a solar panel that they had created using a two-year old design. With the new design, Jennings estimates that a two-foot panel could put out at least 100 milliamps at one volt – enough to power a number of different types of small electrical devices.

So, our solar cells are going to become more and more plantlike? I can certainly see the appeal if it means minimizing dependency on “rare and expensive materials like platinum or indium” as per the Vanderbilt University news release.