In the world of microchips, smaller is better. At Virginia Tech's Fiber and Electro-Optics Research Center (FEORC), the smaller the building blocks of a material, the stronger it will be. And in the world of micro-electronics, the smaller a circuit, the more circuits a chip can hold.

FEORC is researching ultra-small molecular clusters called nanoparticles, which are comprised of metal-oxides. To say they're microscopic is to overestimate their size by thousands.

"Currently microelectronic circuits are micron size (1,000 microns equals one millimeter), and a nanoparticle is 1,000 times smaller than a micron," says FEORC director Richard Claus.

In addition to making ultrasmall microelectronic circuits, the particles can be assembled into structures which form "near perfect thin-films," Claus says. The process can be used to put hard coatings on ultra-strong, ceramic jet-engine blades.