Biodiversity: An archive of opportunity for nanodevices

Since the invention of the transistor in 1947 and the subsequent invention of the integrated circuit, the feature density of microelectronic integrated circuits and devices has increased exponentially (Moore's Law). In complementary metal-oxide semiconductor technology, the minimum feature size in volume production has decreased from 2 mm in 1980 to 0.1 mm in 2002. However, new fabrication strategies are required as conventional top-down fabrication techniques continue to encounter many obstacles and challenges associated with the approach of their fundamental size limits. Interest has therefore focused on molecular scale materials, including biomolecules, to provide the building blocks for next generation functional nanoscale devices. Since nature is an obvious archive of nanofabrication and self-assembly solutions, the opportunity exists to exploit bioinspired and biohybrid solutions to fabrication of nanodevices. This approach has the potential to enable the formation of complex component architectures and offers a number of advantages for fabrication of future nanoscale devices, such as, spatial control at the nanometre length-scale, parallel self-assembly mechanisms and the tendency towards self-correction and defect minimisation. Examples based on templated assembly of nanoparticles using DNA, bacterial S-Layers and other peptides, provide convincing evidence of the feasibility of nanoscale fabrication based on biomimetics. Therefore, as the industry considers its future beyond the perceived limits of Moore's Law, new bioinspired processes and biohybrid devices are envisaged, based on unconventional "bottom-up" self-assembly routes, which, while compatible with silicon processing techniques, provide alternatives to replace or augment high resolution lithography based methods.