Challenge #132
Building computer chips from DNA.
Computer chips are becoming ever smaller and more powerful, but the methods used to manufacture them are now reaching their physical limits. With so-called DNA origami, our researchers want to revolutionize the process.
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In the past few decades, the semiconductor industry has allowed its computer chips to continue to shrink. Manufacturers are now producing transistors with structures in the single-digit nanometer range, making them even smaller than the size of a virus particle.
In the past, in order to be able to construct chips of this size, pieces of the base material had to be cut away until the desired structure was created. But this method has reached its physical limit.
Researchers at the Helmholtz Center Dresden-Rossendorf are working on an amazing solution to this problem: In the future, the complex components will independently assemble themselves from individual molecules and atoms. For this we use so-called DNA origami; a method that works like a molecular magic trick: Without any external intervention, an apparent chaos of short and long strands of genetic material is sorted into a pattern as soon as we set a key stimulus.
In this way, it could be possible to develop circuits that are even smaller than before, with minimal effort and low costs.
Image: HZDR
Ten years of DNA origami
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