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COINS director Alex Zettl builds nanomechanical devices from carbon nanotubes that are quite a bit smaller than the model in his hands. (Berkeley Lab photo)

In his robotics laboratory at UC Berkeley, engineering professor Ron Fearing is taking an engineering cue from the feet of geckos to develop new dry adhesives for future wall-climbing and surgical robots. Across campus, physicist Carlos Bustamante is exploring whether the energy in a tightly wound DNA molecule could drive a motor that's 300 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. Back in the College of Engineering, Arun Majumdar is devising a biosensor chip laden with tiny cantilevers that flex like diving boards when minute molecules indicative of cancer or other diseases bind to them. These efforts are just a sampling of the research projects that will be accelerated by UC Berkeley's new $11.9 million Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems (COINS), launching this fall.

An animated series of scanning electron microscope pictures of the spinning rotor of a nanomotor fabricated in the lab of UC Berkeley physicist Alex Zettl. The entire electric motor is about 500 nanometers across, 300 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. (courtesy the researchers)

The cross-disciplinary center aims to develop a storehouse of mechanical components--from motors to batteries to transistors. These building blocks could then be combined into machines that leverage the unique characteristics that emerge at the nanoscale. (A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter.) In many cases, the devices could be batch produced en masse using methods similar to those used to manufacture integrated circuits.

"We'll be designing new and modifying existing building blocks to make them accessible to assembling technologies to the point where you could order them like you order lumber at a lumberyard," says center director Alex Zettl, a UC Berkeley professor of physics and an internationally-recognized leader in nanoscience.

COINS is one of six Nanoscale Science and Engineering Centers across the country funded by the National Science Foundation. Consisting of researchers from UC Merced, Stanford University , and the California Institute of Technology, the Berkeley-based center is unique in that its specific focus is on mechanics at the nanoscale. The COINS work will take advantage of several state-of-the-art nanoscale "machine shops" now under construction, including Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Nanofabrication Facility in the new headquarters of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), and the Biomolecular Nanotechnology Center at Stanley Hall, future home to the Department of Bioengineering and the California Institute of Quantitative Biomedical Research (QB3).

Ron Fearing and his colleagues fabricated dense patches of synthetic gecko hair with adhesive properties by casting polyurethane in an array of nanopores.

The nano-electromechanical devices and systems (NEMS) that emerge from these laboratories will present scientists and engineers with novel methods for manipulating matter, both artificial and biological. Indeed, the new nanomechanical "tinkertoys" could help bridge the gap between nature's own nanotechhnology and devices constructed in a laboratory.

"Efforts to combine biological and synthetic systems could lead to highly-effective chemical and biological sensors," says Tom Kalil, Special Assistant to the Chancellor for Science and Technology. "Eventually, nanomechanical miniaturization will also revolutionize technologies for computation, communication, and power generation."

For example, Majumdar and Ramamoorthy Ramesh, who holds a joint position in Materials Science and Engineering and the Department of Physics, are constructing nanoscale plumbing systems that pump the most minute measurements of fluid. Their basic research may be the foundation for nanofluidic batteries, or even transistors that manipulates the flow of biological molecules instead of electricity. Meanwhile, mechanical engineer Lydia Sohn is developing an artificial nanopore for disease detection that mimics the filtration system of human cells.

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According to Kalil, who helped spearhead the establishment of COINS, UC Berkeley is already primed to advance the NEMS revolution. Two decades ago, he explains, the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Sensor pioneered the development of micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS). These teensy machines, no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence, are found in everything from automobile airbags to the wireless networks of Smart Dust sensors now making headlines.

Berkeley MEMS pioneers and COINS researchers Tsu-Jae King, Roger Howe, and Jeffrey Bokor are hoping to continue their silicon scaling success by building low-power mechanical resonators out of nanowires for wireless communications applications. They're also proposing NEMS transistors to meet the low-cost, low-power, high-density computation and memory needs of tomorrow's mobile electronics.

"In many respects, Berkeley is the birthplace of micro-electromechanical systems," Kalil says. "So this is a logical place to lead the shift from the microscale to the nanoscale."

"The Tinkertoys of Nanotechnology" by David Pescovitz (Lab Notes, July 2002)

The Gecko Project

"Physicists build world's smallest motor using nanotubes and etched silicon" by Robert Sanders (Media Relations, 23 July 2003)

"The Cellular Mechanic" by David Pescovitz (ScienceMatters@Berkeley, Vol.1, Issue 5)

"Nanopores Detect Diseases" by David Pescovitz (Lab Notes, October/November 2004)

"Nanopores Detect Diseases" by David Pescovitz (Lab Notes, October/November 2004)

"A Nano-Transistor For Biology Not Bits" by David Pescovitz (Lab Notes, November 2003)

"Merging Micromachines and Microelectronics" by David Pescovitz (Lab Notes, August 2003)

"The Lighter Side of Next-Generation Lithography" by David Pescovitz (Lab Notes, March 2003)

Lab Notes is published online by the Public Affairs Office of the UC Berkeley College of Engineering. The Lab Notes mission is to illuminate groundbreaking research underway today at the College of Engineering that will dramatically change our lives tomorrow.

Media contact: Teresa Moore, Lab Notes editor, Director of Public Affairs
Writer, Researcher: David Pescovitz
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© 2004 UC Regents. Updated 1/3/05.