Honey, Who Shrank the Circuits?

from the confining-electrons-for-fun-and-profit dept.
Gina Miller writes "A Wired News article Honey, Who Shrank the Circuits? reports on a conference, Physics of Semiconductors, in Edinburgh, Scotland. A Swedish team (for earlier mention, see Nanodot post of March 5, 2002) reported the construction of a 'double-barrier resonant tunneling device' in nanowires 20 to 50 nm in diameter in which wire segments composed of different semiconductors form devices by creating different types of barriers to electron movement along the wires. Other teams reported progress with fabricating nanostructures like quantum dots and quantum confined atoms (atoms confined in nanocrystal cages) with controlled electronic, optical, and magnetic properties."