A step closer to the future…

pfff……

can’t believe it.. how much i miss my country… my beloved indonesia.. for the better or worse..

can’t say more… I love you my Indonesia.. I do.. in a way I can not explain.. in a way i can not express.. you’ll always be in my heart..

I will never complain about you. No, i won’t… I love you for whatever you are..  No matter what they say… always.. you’ll be in my heart.. .

I enjoyed everything you have given me..and I feel blessed…

Thinking about you, it makes me stronger and stronger by day.. Yes, I do believe in you..and I am proud of you for whatever you are.. I will never let you down and I will never leave you alone…

I want to change you,  but I have to be able to change myself first.
Wish me luck with  my future .. then I will return.. I want to make you  a better place.. land of ideas, lands of hopes.. but first, let me make myself a better person..

I love you my indonesia… I do

-BLFD, August 17, 2007-

When you see unknown material, it is very easy to know whether it is a plastic, wood, or steel, but, what about in atomic scale, if the atoms are chemically and behave the same?

Up to date, there "was" no any techniques would allow us to identify atom by atom and see them at the same time. However, an international team of physicists, led by Ruben Perez of the university of Madrid, has developed a method of atomic "fingerprints" that can determine the chemical identity of individual atoms on a surface mixed with many materials by using atomic force microscopy (AFM). The team could discern tin, silicon and lead, which are chemically the same. Those individual atoms from different materials appeared in distinguishable flase colour.

Dated back to 1989, the "year not to forget", when IBM scientists spelled out their company logo with Xenon atoms, noted the ability to identify and manipulate atoms. Back then, scientists relied on a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) technique, where atoms are detected by a flow of electrons between the tip and an atom. Unfortunately, STM can only identify atoms of materials which are conductors.

Contrarily, AFM works for both conductors and insulators. AFM employs an ultrathin silicon tip placed on a very flexible cantilever. As the tip moves across the surface, it taps up and down when it encounters atoms on surface. This oscillation movement occurs due to the attractive forces associated with the onset of chemical bonding between the silicon in the tip and the atoms on the surface.

It is wellknown that the oscillation frequency depends on atom’s chemical nature. Using this knowledge, the team was able to identify different atomic species, like distinguishing a tree in a noisy fuzzy forest.

Previously, Oscar Custance and his team had demonstrated by using AFM they could move tin atoms strongly attached to germanium surface, writing tin’s chemical symbol, Sn. Combining the method with atomic fingerprinting opens exciting a possible what-might-be-interesting application for the next future, the ability to visualize reactions with atomic resolution. As microelectronics shrink into nanoscale realm, 2000 of today’s transistors can fit across the width of a human hair, then just by arranging a few atoms in predefined patterns, it could be extremely possible to enhance the performance of the devices.

-Blfd, 06.08.2007-

While reading a popular article about nanoscience, i am hooked up with this name again.. Gordon Moore. This guy, the later co-founder of Intel Corp, is so marvelous, as amazing as the visionist Feynmann (hope it’s a fair comparison).

on those early days of the rising of Integrated circuits (IC’s), Moore was interviewed by an electronic magazine, for a report on how semiconductor component would grow and develop in the future and a prediction for the next decade. At these early days, around 60 components on a chip had been able integrated by Moore group. Amazingly, he started from the first planar transistors to extrapolate 60 000 components on a chip by using semi log paper ONLY. 10 year passed, This corresponded to a double very year. And, still, he was surprised how precisely his prediction had been meet. Of course, a lot of development kept on going since then. On Route, Moore’s law has been applied to many developments beyond integration density on cips. For example, the increase of data storage performance of hard discs also refers to Moore’s law. In fact, seems that everyhing in industry that increases exponentially in performance, is always referred to Moore’s Law.

However, the atomic structure of matter, of course, will some day set limits to the evolution of the integration technology accorrding to Moore’s law. Historically, limits had been anticipated much earlier, and surpassed. For example, in the early days, it was thought that gate oxide thickness could probably not be dropped much below 100 nm because the probability of pinholes increased. Nevertheless, gate oxide thickness now approached 1 nm. The rapidly increasing tunnelling currents represent the next challenge. A solution may be novel dielectric oxides with improved permittivities. Another classic issue has been optical lithography. In the early days, it was believed that limit would be 1 micrometer. Nevertheless, the principle has been extended to 0,1 micrometer. And even by using soft X-rays, as we call it today, extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, A 10nm lithography scale has been reached. This, of course, will set a bunch of further applications in electronics. A new age will come.

So.. what is next? and what the limit will be? Challenges always make science exciting…

~~on the shoulders of giants~~