The small print

摘要

Nanotechnology: A noveltechnique borrows from screen printing to provide a way to build tiny devices using miniature stencils The field of nanotechnology—making widgets just a few billionths of a metre across—has been slow to take off. One reason for the delay is the difficulty of assembling useful devices from such tiny building blocks. Tobias Kraus, of ibm's Research Laboratories in Zurich, Switzerland, and his colleagues have come up with a new way to print such structures which could help. It is based on screen printing, which uses a stencil and paint to create an image. Existing ways of printing devices at the nanoscale tend to be complex and expensive, and more appropriate for making silicon chips. By contrast, the new technique is easy and cheap.