The team led by electrical engineering professor Kwon Sung-hoon of Seoul National University said Sunday that they made a super-mini Eiffel Tower, Greek shrine, and computer keyboard by cutting grooves into boards and pouring liquids containing self-assembling micro-mini components into them. These micro-mini structures are about a couple hundred micrometers (㎛) in size -- and one micrometer is a millionth of a meter.

Micro-mini structures made from self-assembling fluid technology developed by a Seoul National University research team led by Prof. Kwon Sung-hoon.

The study, released on the Internet on Sunday (U.S. time), will be published as a cover story in the July edition of international science journal Nature Materials.

Robots commonly assemble delicate components for complex structures like memory chips, but even robots have difficulty handling components measured in micrometers. To solve this problem, a self-assembly process was developed recently that uses individual components which contain in themselves enough information to build a template for a structure. Unfortunately this process isn't very efficient.

The Korean team combined the robotic and self-assembly methods by cutting grooves into the surface of a board and putting the components into a liquid. The liquid is poured onto the surface and the components move along the grooves to find their places.

"The new technology could be used to assemble silicon memory chips or to turn living cells or tissues into certain patterns in tissue engineering," Prof. Kwon said. "We are conducting a study to find a way to grow cells into forms we want."

(englishnews@chosun.com )