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The Nanotech Mirage--A Differing View
September 16, 2008
I received the comments below from Dr. Adolfo Gutierrez, director of uBricks Research (Troy, New York), after we posted September’s “Movers & Shakers” podcast interview of Robert Geer, the chief academic officer and professor of nanoscale science at the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at the University of Albany, New York. Geer’s views about nanotech’s future coincide with those of the vast majority of our industry and others (including yours truly), which is why I thought you might want to read what Gutierrez had to say, since one so rarely runs into this magnitude of skepticism about nanotech. Geer declined to reply, stating instead that he stands by every single word of his podcast.
I’ll be very interested in seeing what you, the readers, think of Gutierrez’s views.
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I read Dr. Robert Geer’s interview in SI about the serendipitous nature of “Nanotech’s Incredible Reach.” Although I share the dreams and hopes for nanoscience, I also think that the whole nanotech field is overdue for a reality check.
We seem to be stuck in the notion that nanotechnology is new science that opens new frontiers. However, nanotechnology seems to be a marketing branding term, not a genuine and coherent research field. Every physicist, chemist, biochemist, device engineer, materials engineer, etc., has dealt forever with small-scale science. This has been true since at least Aristotle’s time. The notion that atoms can now be manipulated is also not new as evidenced, for example, by chemical synthesis. The only new thing is that we can now “observe” and “visualize” atoms better than before. Perhaps this visual experience is the real source of much of the past 10 years of nano-marketing excitement. Unfortunately, productive engineering at nanoscale is much more complex and costly than dramatic visualizations or physical probing; we are all painfully acknowledging this undeniable reality.
I have pioneered several MEMS and NEMS devices, and developed unique testing methods and instruments. In 1993, I originated the phrase, “mLab-on-a-Chip,” started some businesses based on micro/nano technologies, and developed a few electron nanodevices; however I’ve always been reluctant to brand these pursuits as “nanoscale” anything, as dimension per se is an abstraction with little meaning in the physical world. It is the manifestation of physical effects that defines the scientific nature of a research field.
Most traditional disciplines don’t assign importance to the dimensional scale of the structures and processes involved; but only to functional outcomes—at any scale. For example, a researcher working in structures inside cells and microtubule transport processes has never called himself a nanobiologist; he’s a functional microbiologist, a structural cell biologist or a biochemist. Likewise, no chemist would call himself an “atom nanoengineer,” or a structural biologist a “life nanoengineer.” They practice organic, inorganic, bio or structural chemistry based on functional outcomes, not dimensional scale.
Because language and reasoning are closely linked, the abuse of “nanoscale” as an all-encompassing word has had a distorting effect among scientists, policy makers, entrepreneurs and investors. This is important because young and inexperienced people are pursuing “nanocareers” in the hope that there will be a reward at the end of the formative “nanocycle,” but there might be no career at all in a product, market and functionalities-driven world.
Nanotechnology, 10 years into the branded nano-era, has failed to deliver valuable products. Moreover, those involved in the field have resorted to wide-ranging definitions to include all kinds of functionally rich building blocks such as DNA bases, structural proteins, integrated sensors, logic gates, meta materials, and many other functional building blocks sharing dimensional scales but lacking relationships to functional effects.
Is nanotech a mirage without foundation? Nanotube applications, for one, would
appear to indicate the contrary.
Professionals of functionally defined fields are amused by this on-the-fly nano-marketers’ redefinition of concepts. In fact, most of these now nano-concepts predate the nano-era and will, most likely, postdate it. The scientific and engineering challenges associated with these functional fields remain as challenging now as they were before the era of “nano branding.”
The defocusing effects of defining a field based on scale are serious and can lead to research dilution, lack of synergies and poor-quality science. Imagine civil and device engineers, immunologists, physicians, and botanists defining themselves, their research fields as “meter-scale.” research efforts. How good would the resulting quality of those defocused efforts have been?
I see the adverse effects of nanoscale everything first-hand as a researcher, investor and entrepreneur in the “nanospace”; where nanotech has been so far one of the worst-performing scientific efforts in recent memory. After spending in excess of $30 billion globally on R&D since 1999, the world still awaits functional breakthroughs, products and payoffs. Naturally, funding is collapsing at a fast rate.
Delaying valuable outcomes under the forgiving mantle of “excessive difficulty” would be acceptable except that there’s a long line of people waiting with their own non-nanobranded research agendas, and they’re beginning to win policy battles, research dollars, and investors’ confidence.
Boards are quickly abandoning their support for “nanoelectronics”. Five of the main electronic companies have thrown in the towel since March of last year, and investors have all but dried up nanoelectronics disbursements. National governments are slowing down funding and the field is retrenching the funding of structures that are difficult to qualify as objective or even competitive. Nanoelectronics research seems headed for a long and cold winter, deeply underfunded, clinging to fewer than five corporations worldwide, and a dozen surviving startups. Perhaps the business community is becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the very unclear risk vs. reward proposition offered by scientists and engineers.
Intel does not refer to small electronics as “nanoelectronics,” it simply sees itself as developing awesome killer IT products for the next 100 years; in fact, the company discourages research under the mantle of “nanoelectronics.” Interestingly enough, it’s still a leader in nanoscale R&D.
IBM, on the other hand, is a big supporter of nanoelectronics. It regularly reports nano-breakthroughs, a most unexpected outcome as IBM has a relatively small R&D budget compared to the remaining integrated electronics industry. Regardless, IBM’s real challenge is to convert its nano R&D into products that can contribute to the company’s bottom line, as suggested by the recent Lucent-Alcatel decision. Up until about 18 months ago, Lucent-Alcatel used to report nano breakthroughs with an intensity similar to IBM’s, but now they are being disbanded and their core research facility, Bell Labs, is officially out of integrated electronics basic and applied research, and their IC research fab has been shut down. They couldn’t convert the results of their research into product lines fitting their remaining businesses. This is a lesson that should have a focusing effect on the few remaining players.
Once the “nano” brand losses its remaining value, will we once again focus our attention on functional outcomes and not on dimensional scale? This is a major issue, because we may well choose to focus R&D efforts on die stacking and complex packaging, advanced interconnects, parallel architectures and software optimization; and through that extend a functional version of Moore’s Law that emphasizes end-to-end productivity gains, instead of steady miniaturization for its own sake.
Product focus always results in an efficient narrowing of options. Nano investments are delivering very little return because they are not bounded; they are spread very thinly across human knowledge. The Apollo Program put us on the moon by spending an amount comparable to that spent globally so far on nano research, over a similar period of time. The outcome was somewhat different because the goal was clear.
Dr. Geer’s institution is most likely on the right short-term research track because it endorses the International Technology Road Map for Semiconductors, an industrial map that imposes clear technology goals, and resultant focusing effects; regrettably this is not true for nanotechnology as a whole, where scattered efforts seem to have been the rule.
Posted by Alexander E. Braun on September 16, 2008 | Comments (12)
