Building blocks of human body will serve as a model for the new microprocessors of International Business Machines Corp. In a move to build smaller microchips and save costs the computer maker plans to use artificial DNA nanostructures, or "DNA origami" to build tiny microchips.

"This is the first demonstration of using biological molecules to help with processing in the semiconductor industry," IBM research manager Spike Narayan said in an interview with Reuters.

"Basically, this is telling us that biological structures like DNA actually offer some very reproducible, repetitive kinds of patterns that we can actually leverage in semiconductor processes," he said.

The research was a conjoint initiative of scientists at IBM's Almaden Research Center and the California Institute of Technology.

At present time the smaller are the microprocessors the more expensive the technology and equipment. According to Narayan in case the DNA origami process scales to production-level companies will be able to abandon high cost production of complex tools and instead of hundreds of millions of dollars they will be able to spend less than a million dollars for polymers, DNA solutions, and heating implements.

Meanwhile, the idea is just at the stage of development and needs years of researches and experimentation.