Today's micro‐ and nano‐fabrication is essentially two‐dimensional, with very limited possibilities of accessing the third dimension. The most viable way to mass‐fabricate functional structures at the nano‐scale, such as electronics or MEMS, with equal feature sizes in all directions, is by three‐dimensional self‐assembly. Up to now, three‐dimensional self‐assembly has mainly been restricted to crystals of polymer spheres. We report on two‐ and three‐dimensional self‐assembly of silicon cubes, levitated in a paramagnetic fluid. We demonstrate the benefits of templating and study the effect of a change in hydrophilicity of the cubes. These experiments bring us one step closer to three‐dimensional self‐assembly of anisotropic, semiconducting units, which is a crucial milestone in overcoming the scaling limits imposed by contemporary 2D microfabrication. Levitated assembly of silicon cubes. (© 2016 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH &Co. KGaA, Weinheim)

This paper presents a simple code to combat the 2-Dimensional Inter-Symbol Interference (2D-ISI) effect that is present in data storage on magnetic bit patterned media. Whether the ISI effect is constructive or destructive depends on the surrounding bits. Therefore, we propose a simple 2D coding scheme to mitigate the ISI effect. With this 2D coding scheme in square patterned media, every 2-by-3 array has one redundant bit which has the opposite or same value of one of its adjacent bits. Compared to the 2D coding scheme in [1] under the condition of the same areal density, the proposed 2D coding scheme increases the allowable bit-position jitter in square patterned media by 1% at a BER of 10 −4 ; while it allows the effective storage capacity to be increased by around 5.5%.

We measured the fluctuation in shape of magnetic islands in bit patterned media fabricated by laser interference lithography. This fluctuation can be accurately described by a model based on a Fourier series expansion of the perimeter of the islands. The model can be easily linked to amplitude and jitter noise. We show that the amplitude and jitter noise are in principle correlated, and the jitter noise increases with increasing island area. The correlation is small for media prepared by laser interference lithography, but expected to gain importance for high density bit patterned media.Index Terms-Channel modeling, laser interference lithography, magnetic bit patterned media, media noise.

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