[Engineering Feature]
Nanotechnology: The Next Revolution To Redefine Electronics
Working with atoms, molecules, and quantum effects from the bottom up, researchers are hot on the trail of self-assembling, precise, adaptable, and affordable nanosystems.
Nanotechnology, the ability to manipulate and organize matter and structures from the atomic up to the molecular scales, is widely viewed as the most significant technological frontier being explored. Generally meant to define devices with feature sizes of 100 nm or smaller (1 nm equals the span of about seven to 10 hydrogen atoms), nanotechnology is being heralded as a vastly more powerful technology than ever seen before. Major innovations are anticipated in virtually every industry and public sector.
The military has intense interest in nanotechnology to create better materials, more durable armaments, widely dispersed sensing systems, and robust communications systems. It believes that nanotechnology will alter warfare more than the invention of gun powder. The Department of Defense (DoD) has supported nanotechnology research for over two decades and expects to spend $243 million on it this fiscal year.
In 1986, researcher and author K. Eric Drexler introduced the term nanotechnology in his book Engines of Creation. The book describes anatomically precise molecular manufacturing systems and their products. Drexler also is the cofounder and chairman of the Foresight Institute, a nonprofit educational organization consisting of leading scientists whose goal is to help prepare society for anticipated advanced technologies.
But the idea for nanotechnology really dates back to late 1959, when physicist and Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman gave an invited talk to the American Physical Society's annual meeting. His noted speech, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," described the challenges of manipulating and controlling things on a very tiny scale of molecules and atoms. This can be considered the dawn of the present-day vision of nanotechnology.
The original visionaries and many present-day researchers view nanotechnology from a bottom-up perspective, concentrating on a better understanding of the chemical, biological, and quantum properties of atoms and molecules of all types of materials, not just silicon. However, the inevitable march of semiconductor technology with its top-down approach of squeezing smaller and smaller features into a given area also is ongoing.
Like it or not, IC designers are being forced to solve these very issues addressed by the bottom-up group of researchers. They also face the increasing costs of lithographically fabricating ever smaller silicon devices. In fact, many bottom-up proponents warn that eventually we must move away from semiconductor lithography and find new ways to shrink things because it doesn't look like existing planar technology can get us down to the molecular precision levels being sought.
Ken Smith, vice president for technology at Carbon Nanotechnologies Inc., shares some of these views. "If the apparent promise of nano-electronics continues to be strong during the next decade, a growing number of engineers will have to develop new design paradigms required for circuitry that are truly different from those developed during the 'silicon age' of the last 50 years," he says. Smith anticipates that these new design paradigms will rely on what has been learned from silicon fabrication and will use some of the same approaches while adding others to deal with circuitry in which the active elements and interconnects are nanometer dimensions.
Meyya Meyyappan, director of nanotechnology for NASA's Ames Research Center, is even more vociferous on this point: "The most important and major challenge to realizing commercially available nanodevices is to overcome material problems. That means designers must look at what architectures to use. Continuing with conventional CMOS processes will get very expensive. The true realization of nanotechnology will only happen if we come up with novel process solutions, the so-called bottom-up assembly approach, instead of using just IC lithography alone."
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