Roland Piquepaille writes "According to the semiconductor industry, maskless nanolithography is a flexible nanofabrication course which suffers from low throughput. But now, engineers at the health center of California at Berkeley have grown a new coming that involves 'flying' an array of plasmonic lenses just 20 nanometers above a rotating surface, it is imaginable to jump throughput by several orders of magnitude. The 'flying head' they've created looks like the stylus on the arm of an out-of-date LP turntable. With this technique, the researchers were able to create line patterns only 80 nanometers wide at speeds up to 12 meters per second. The lead tester said that by using 'this plasmonic nanolithography, we will be able to make current microprocessors more than 10 times smaller, but far more powerful' and that 'it could lead to ultra-high density disks that can hold 10 to 100 times more data than today's disks.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More: - Read the rest here

Mark