For a pair of UW graduate students, two years of research culminated in a first-place award for best paper at a global conference on nanoelectronics.

The paper described the efforts of the group — including two co-advisors — in combining a chip and a fluorescence detection device through self-assembly.

Out of hundreds of papers, the paper written by Samuel Kim and Ehsan Saeedi, titled Self-Assembled Heterogeneous Fluorescence Detection System, was selected as the winner.

Both students are in the UW electrical engineering department.

Kim attended the IEEE NEMS — Nanoelectronics and Molecular Systems — conference last month in Bangkok.

He gave a half an hour presentation on the research to a panel of judges, international scientists and researchers.

The paper was chosen as the best out of 10 finalists.

"It's great because this means that other people think that our project is useful and has the potential to be used to make different complicated heterogeneous systems," said Saeedi, who was unable to attend the conference.

"The basic idea of our research is to use a method called self-assembly to integrate heterogeneous components onto a common platform," said Kim, the lead writer of the paper. "By using this technique, we are able to create devices which were not possible using conventional semiconductor fabrication processes."

Using the self-assembly method, silicon and gallium arsenide, a light emitting material, are combined onto a single chip.

Although this process is the primary method of molecular detection used today, this new development changes the production and availability of the fluorescence-detection experiments.

The low-cost production and the small size of the chips would make disposable, portable platforms available and would replace the large bench-top scanners that are commonly used now.

This creates the potential for cheap and easy HIV/AIDS tests in developing countries.

"One of the major goals of this research is to bring the benefits of this research to the masses via bringing it to a clinical setting," Kim said. "This may pave the way for things such as personalized medicines, early diagnosis, detection of predispositions to genetic disorders, all the while allowing these tests to be conducted on a portable platform."

According to the IEEE-NEMS Web site, the conference brought "together world-leading researchers in the several focused topics of MEMS and Nanotechnology to disseminate their latest research results and allow cross-disciplinary exchange of knowledge to further advance both technological areas."

Reach reporter Abby Walker at news@thedaily.washington.edu.