How to talk with nano things: the Micro for Nano approach

The nano or low-dimensional material is the key and in the meantime the start of a path that must conduct to the final product. The presented Micro4Nano (M4N) architecture was conceived with this path in mind, thinking that the information from the nano/low dimensions can be extracted with a distributed sensor array on chip, that reads electrical parameters in various locations directly from the device surface, where for example arrays of nanostructured materials are grown. The use of an on-die array sensor has several advantages: the direct growth of the nanomaterial on device surface permits the minimization of the stray capacitance as well as the noise issues it is related to; it improves the macrometric inspection of the material, that usually is clustered and not homogeneous at its first realization phase; enables a flexible and robust test-bed for electrical properties inspection on nanodevices, suitable for most of the available and new emerging nanostructured materials.