Defining Nanotechnology
Peter Singer, Editor-in-Chief -- Semiconductor International, 1/1/2007
A nanometer is one billionth of a meter. It's almost as wide as a DNA molecule and 10× the diameter of a hydrogen atom. As Thomas Kenny of Stanford University describes it, it's about how much your fingernails grow each second or how far the San Andreas Fault slips in half a second. It is the thickness of a drop of water spread over a square meter. It is one-tenth the thickness of the metal film on your tinted sunglasses or your potato chip bag. As they might say in Boston, it's wicked small!
What happens at such a small dimension is quite amazing, unique quantum and surface phenomena. Gold, for example, which is normally chemically inert, can serve as a potent chemical catalyst at nanometer dimensions. “One nanometer is truly a magical point on the scale of length -- at this place, the smallest man-made things meet the natural atoms and molecules of the living world,” said Eugene Wong, formerly head of engineering at the U.S. National Science Foundation . “Recent discoveries at this scale are promising to revolutionize biology, electronics, materials and all their applications. We're seeing inventions and discoveries that were unimaginable only a short time ago.”
What so captured the imagination of Wong, and that of the entire world, is nanotechnology. In our cover story this month, we look at the history of nanotechnology and how many have described its incredible potential as equivalent to a second “Silicon Revolution.”
What's interesting to me is seeing how those in the semiconductor industry view and define nanotechnology. The common rule of thumb definition is that nanotechnology involves the control of matter on a scale <100 nm. By that definition, the semiconductor industry has been working with nanotechnology for at least a decade to the point where it has become routine.
The problem is that that's not what most people think of as nanotechnology. Even Richard Feynman, who is credited with being the first to describe a vision of nanotechnology during a talk at the California Institute of Technology in 1959, clearly differentiated controlling things on a small scale and miniaturization.
So let's ignore, for a moment, the complex interactions that are exquisitely controlled in a sub-100 nm CMOS transistor, and the fact that if it weren't for the semiconductor industry, discoveries such as the atomic force microscope and the carbon nanotube (CNT) — two cornerstones of nanotechnology — might never have happened. Instead, let's think of nanotechnology as a new science where novel structures and fundamentally new properties and processes can be explored and obtained. It's a world where medicine is delivered by tiny robots (nanobots); where transistors are replaced by mechanical switches grown through self-assembly out of “gray goo”; and the very essence of matter itself can be changed, with the click of a cursor, from hard to soft, or from fluorescent to super-reflective to invisible. That's the stuff that nanotechnology dreams are made of!
These are all being actively worked on, by the way. What nobody knows is how soon this work might result in real products. Many would say that day has already arrived. Nantero (Cambridge, Mass.), for example, is actively developing semiconductor products using CNTs in a production CMOS fab, and CNT sensors, probe tips and transparent conductive films are on the market.
What has made everything maddeningly confusing is that, seemingly overnight, all of the world's research that is an extension of basic semiconductor device research and straightforward materials science has been recast as “nanotechnology” research. Post-CMOS development work is now labeled nanotechnology research. With much of that work being done in government-funded university labs, once-microelectronics labs are now nanotechnology labs. I suppose this is understandable. Nobody wants to miss out on what's expected to be a $2.6T market by 2014, or billions of dollars in government and venture capitalist funding. But it has all served to muddle how people define nanotechnology.
An incredible amount of research is underway in what I would define as nanotechnology: how nanostructures, such as CNTs, nanowires and quantum dots, are designed and fabricated. That's what we'll be exploring later this month in a webcast titled “Nanotech's Role in Post-CMOS Production.” Please tune in on Jan. 16 at 12 p.m. CST.
