Dallas Business Journal - by Jeff Bounds Staff writer

 

A group of local companies and universities is part of a consortium that has landed nearly $10 million in state and federal funding to find ways of building three-dimensional objects atom by atom.

 

The broader goal, officials say, is to bring to markets a host of technologies that could result from the work, ranging from high-speed DNA sequencing to fiber optics that can carry more phone calls, data and video at faster rates.

 

Local players in the project including Richardson nanotechnology company Zyvex Labs, Dallas’ airplane maker Vought Aircraft, the University of Texas at Dallas, the University of North Texas and the North Texas Regional Center for Innovation & Commercialization.

 

Also participating are General Dynamics, Integrated Circuit Scanning Probe Instruments, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Central Florida.

 

Of the $9.7 million the group has nailed down, some $5 million is coming from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa. The remaining $4.7 million is from Texas’ Emerging Technology Fund.

 

“It’s a real big project. We’re excited to be part of it,” says Robert Wallace, a professor of material science and engineering at UTD.

 

John Randall, a Zyvex Labs vice president and a principal investigator on the project, says the lion’s share of work on the project will be done locally and in Texas.

 

The notion of building things atom-by-atom isn’t new. In 1990, scientists at IBM published an image of the company’s initials spelled out in atoms of xenon.

 

But the next step — extending that two-dimensional structure to three dimensions — is a bit tougher. “In practice, we’re just simply trying to produce manufacturing technology and three-dimensional objects, with machine control, that are extremely precise,” Randall says. “We believe we can make three-dimensional structures. It will have a significant impact in science and technology.”

 

The goal is to use what’s called “tip-based nanofabrication,” which uses a microscope with very high resolution and a very sharp tip, along with gases, to place atoms precisely where the researchers want them.

 

There are different ways of doing this, according to Randall. The difference between other research projects that are using the technique and the local research consortium is that the local group is trying to place atoms precisely where they want them to go.

 

That could lead to a host of new applications, from extremely low-power radios to highly sensitive sensors, Randall says. Some of the big uses probably haven’t even been thought up yet. “This level of precision will enable lots of things that we never thought were possible before,” he says.

 

Randall says one product of the research eventually will be a piece of silicon that will be used as a measuring stick, as buyers of the product will know that it is a specific number of atoms in width and length.