A Bottom-up Assembly Approach
Towards Integrated Nanosystems

Dr. Yu Huang

Departments of Material Science & Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Date: Thursday, January 13, 2005
Time: 4:00 p.m.
Place: Engineering II, Room 3361

ABSTRACT

A bottom-up approach, in which functional systems are assembled from chemically synthesized, well-defined nanoscale building-blocks, can go far beyond the limits of top-down technology by defining key nanometer scale metrics through synthesis and subsequent assembly-not by lithography, and offers the potential for low cost molecular manufacture.

I will focus on bottom-up assembly of integrated nanosystems using semiconductor nanowire (NW) building blocks. I will first give a general overview of NW building blocks with precisely controlled chemical composition, physical dimension and electronic, optical properties. Subsequently, I will describe hierarchical assembly methods for organizing NW building blocks into functional devices and complex architectures. In particular, micro-fluidic flow has been explored for the assembly of NWs with controlled spatial location and orientation. Next, I will discuss a variety of conceptually new nanoscale electronic and photonic devices, and device integrations enabled by high quality NWs and flexible assembly methods. I will give a few examples of novel electronic devices such as crossed nanowire p-n diode, crossed nanowire field-effect transistor (FET) and integrated logic circuits, as well as optoelectronics devices including light emitting diodes (LED), multi-color LED arrays, and integrated LED-FET array. Lastly, exploration of the potential to incorporate nanowire optical functions into conventional silicon microelectronic circuits and the potential to fabricate nanoscale laser diodes will be demonstrated. The potential application of these nanoscale light sources for chemical and biological analyses will also be discussed.