IBM Develops World’s Smallest 3D Map

IBM created world’s smallest 3D map. It uses a tiny, silicon tip with a sharp apex - 100,000 times smaller than a sharpened pencil point - to create patterns and structures as small as 15 nanometre at greatly reduced cost and complexity. One nanometer is billionth of a meter. The new discovery opens up future hope for nanosized objects in fields such as electronics, future chip technology, medicine, life sciences, and optoelectronics.

Complete 3D map of the world that measures only 22 by 11 micrometre fit on a polymer. A kilometre of altitude is equivalent to roughly eight nanometre. It is composed of 500,000 pixels, each measuring 20 square nanometre, and was created in only 2 minutes and 23 seconds. A 25-nanometre-high 3D view of Alpine mountain which is 14,692 feet high was created in molecular glass that represents a scale of 1:5 billion. The core component of the new technique is a tiny, very sharp silicon tip that measures 500 nanometre in length and only a few nanometres at its apex.

“Advances in nanotechnology are intimately linked to the existence of high-quality methods and tools for producing nanoscale patterns and objects on surfaces,” explains physicist Armin Knoll of IBM Research, Zurich.