Mass producing tiny structures.

• Position: Nanotechnology

They look like an elegant row of columns, tiny enough for atomic-scale hide-and-seek, but these colonnades represent a new way to bring nanotechnology into mass production.

Nanotechnology, the ability to create and work with structures and materials on an atomic scale, holds the promise of extreme miniaturization for electronics, chemical sensors, and medical devices. Yet, while researchers have created tiny silicon wires and connected them together one at a time, these methods cannot easily be scaled up.

"It takes weeks to make one or two, and you end up with different sizes and characteristics," says M. Saif Islam, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, University of California, Davis. Like handmade shoes, every manually assembled nanostructure comes out slightly different. Engineers would rather construct devices the way cars or computers are built, with every item as consistent as possible.

While working at the Quantum Science Research group of Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Islam and colleagues came up with a new approach. Silicon wafers used for building microcircuits usually are polished at one specific angle to the atomic planes of silicon. Instead, the group used a...