Pentagonal Tiles Pave the Way towards Ultrasmall Organic Electronics
Electronics is creating wonders everyday, and the latest it has to offer is quite remarkable. Ring-like molecules with unusual five-fold symmetry bind strongly to a copper surface, due to a substantial transfer of charge, but experience remarkably little difficulty in sideways diffusion, and exhibit surprisingly little interaction between neighboring molecules.
Currently, commercial electronics use a top-down approach, with the milling or etching away of inorganic material, such as silicon, to make a device smaller. Researchers are therefore looking for ingenious solutions in the creation of ever smaller electronics. The field of nanotechnology is taking a bottom-up approach of creating electronics using naturally self-assembling organic components, such as polymers, which will be capable of spontaneously forming devices with the desired electronic or optical characteristics.
This new research, thus paves the way for the nano-scale self-assembly of organic building blocks, a promising new route towards the next generation of ultra-small electronic devices.