The Nanotech Mirage--A Differing View

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.

* *
*

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.