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IBM Makes a Microscopic Work of Art

by Tim Stevens on September 12, 2007 at 10:24 AM

IBM Makes Tiny Golden ArtLooking at the picture of the sun here, you might shrug your shoulders. After all, it's nothing much to look at when compared to the works of art many celebrities are becoming thanks to the wonders of Photoshop. But considering that this picture was printed using 20,000 microscopic blobs of gold -- each just 60-nanometers wide -- and it's suddenly more interesting. To get an idea of just how small those lil' gold nuggest are, consider this:, An average hair is about 80,000 nanometers wide.

Creating tiny, golden works of art may not seem like productive work for a scientist at IBM, but it's got some solid technological and business reasoning behind it. For example, the ability to effectively print such tiny works of art means that IBM can also print other things, like the actual internals of the CPU currently cooking away inside whatever computer you're using right now.

CPUs -- essentially, the computing parts of a computers-- are already marvels of gold and silicon micro-circuitry, but to make them faster, they must have even smaller internal circuits. At these nano-sized levels, the innards of CPUs can be literally "printed," a relatively easy method of mass-producing the circuitry, which will keep production costs down on the ever faster computers of the future. And that's the real beauty of this work of art.

From AOL Money & Finance

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Tags: art, Gold, IBM, Nanotechnology

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