A Virtuous Circle


Technologies can succeed only when they combine appropriate control of energy, materials, design, measurement, fabrication, and marketing. Absent any of these, one has at best a laboratory demonstration; at worst, a costly or even fraudulent disappointment.

Nanotechnology, though, has all these elements at the ready. What's more, nanotechnology represents a practical solution to fundamental limits being encountered in all these areas by existing approaches.

Nanotechnology therefore has vastly more friends than enemies: There is really no industry that's likely to perceive nanotechnology as a threat. Rather, it represents the prospect of offering many industries their next generation of improved products that deliver more capabilityor novel, previously unobtainable capabilityat a quite attractive price.

A virtuous circle can be kinked or broken, though, if those who offer a supposed technology improvement fail to understand the environment in which it will be used. On a much larger scale than the nanometer, it might look as if buttons (which can be lost) or zippers or drawstrings (which can break or jam) might be better replaced by Velcro fasteners on soldiers' battle uniforms, but a soldier's first reaction to a Velcro-flapped pocket might well be, "This makes way too much noise!"

Before manufacturers develop nanotechnology products based on what the developers think are superior features or properties, it's essential to study the ways that existing products are actually usedand the features or properties of those products that users never think to mention when asked what they like or dislike, because it's never occurred to them that things could be otherwise.

At the same time, those who bring new products to market must anticipate and address prospective buyers' objectionseven when those objections arise from a buyer's combining past experience with inadequate understanding of future benefits. When vacuum tubes were being replaced by transistors in field communications equipment, one experienced technician complained to an engineer that a failed transistor needed a piece of test gear to identify it, unlike a blown tube, which could easily be recognized on sight. That's perfectly accurate, but it failed to appreciate the enormous reduction in the actual number of device failures that would be encountered in the field with solid-state devices.

Bringing nanoscale processes and products to market may depend on overcoming similarly incomplete understanding of their impact.

Technologies fail to gain traction in the marketplace when they require too great a discontinuous leap from existing modes of design and production. Nanotechnology has already succeeded, though, in building on existing manufacturing foundations; one example is the May 2004 production of carbonnanotube computer memory cells on a high-volume semiconductor production line by LSI Logic, working with nanotechnology semiconductor pioneer Nantero Inc. in Woburn, Massaschusetts.[9]

Perhaps equally important is that nanotechnology semiconductors don't depend on one single approach, such as Nantero's. Another company, Zettacore Inc., of Englewood, Colorado, is developing memory chips that use a chlorophyll-derived molecule having the ability to act as an electron-storage site. Still another approach has been demonstrated at Boston University, where a microscopic mechanical beamin late-2004 tests, 8,000 nanometers longcan be made to flex in either of two directions, thereby storing a binary 1 or 0, the form in which computer data is stored and manipulated. When scaled down to 1,000-nanometer length, the resulting computer memory device is expected to store 100 gigabytes per square inch while operating at frequencies exceeding 1 GigaHertz, surpassing semiconductor memory in both respects.

These three approachesone based on an engineered molecule, another on a biologically derived molecule, and yet another on a nanoscale implementation of a familiar physical behaviordemonstrate how broad the nanotechnology field really is.

Putting aside the nano- prefix, let's look for a moment at the many aspects that make up a technology. The technology of firearms is a well-studied example. Its foundations include the packaging and control of energy on the proper scale and in a convenient and reliable form. Without gunpowder that's stable enough to store but prompt and vigorous in detonating when desired, nothing else could happen.

Nanotechnology has that control of energy at its disposalwhether in the form of electrons, photons, or mechanical storage methods.

Firearms also depend on materials science: Simple materials could be used to construct bulky, failure-prone cannons, but a practical portable firearm demanded more sophisticated knowledge of materials behavior. Applications of nanomaterials that are already in the marketplace display this knowledge.

Finally, and most often noted when firearms are used as an example, there is the need for precise and reproducible methods of manufacture. This implies tools and techniques of measurement and fabrication. Nanoscale manufacture, in the purists' sense of controlling the arrangements of individual molecules or even atoms, implies at the very least the ability to resolve images of structures on this scale. It's one thing to measure bulk properties of materials and to estimate the degree of molecular order and purity that's been attained; it's another to observe, let alone manipulate, material fragments at this level of precision.

Progress in this area has been notable, though, and promising. FEI Co., in Hillsboro, Oregon, announced in 2004 its achievement of image resolution below the threshold of one Angstrom unit (0.1 nanometers)that is, about the size of a single hydrogen atom.[10] The U.S. Department of Energy began work in 2000 on a microscope with half-Angstrom resolution, using an aberration-correcting assembly of multiple magnetic-field "lens" elements: As of the end of 2004, the first such unit at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in Berkeley, California, was expected to be operational by 2008.




Nanotechnology. Science, Innovation, and Opportunity
Nanotechnology: Science, Innovation, and Opportunity
ISBN: 0131927566
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 204

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