Oct. 25, 2006 — The SEMI trade association will highlight non-traditional approaches to electronics manufacturing at its NanoForum trade show.

Among the techniques that will be explored, say show organizers, are new approaches for harnessing biological processes for nanoassembly. MIT Professor Angela Belcher is scheduled to discuss how her lab is getting viruses to assemble alloys and how they are developing ways to make them into electrodes for li-ion batteries and other energy devices. The first application being developed is a battery based on a polymer film electrolyte with a metal oxide anode film grown from solution on one side, and a metal phosphate cathode film on the other.

Belcher is slated to be part of a panel titled “Nanoelectronics: Beyond CMOS”, along with Yang Yang of UCLA. His research is into growing films of tobacco mosaic virus coated with nanoparticles that works as non-volatile digital memory. Yang’s group reports using a virus not just as a template or scaffold for assembling a metal thin film, but as an active component of rudimentary digital memory.

NanoForum is slated for Oct. 31 to Nov.2 in San Jose, Calif.