RNT Nanofoil (TM) containing thousands of alternating nanoscale layers of nickel and aluminum.

Nanotechnology

February / March 2005 By: Dean Takahashi Volume 3 Number 1

Print this Article

E-mail this Article

Nanotechnology has bridged science fiction and fact ever since it was first conceptualized in 1959. That was when renowned physicist Richard P. Feynman speculated in a lecture entitled "There's Plenty of Room At the Bottom" that it would be possible to assemble the tiniest structures atom by atom by the year 2000.

Feynman proved to be prescient. Today there are many examples that nanotechnology —€“ the assembly of products on a molecular level that can be measured in less than 100 nanometers, where a nanometer is a billionth of a meter—€” is a real technology that is generating revenues for companies across the globe. Materials that have been painstakingly engineered on the molecular level are springing up everywhere. Cosmetics maker L'Oreal uses tiny "nanocapsules" to deliver skin-healing chemicals in its Lancome lotions so that they sink much deeper into the skin. General Motors has crafted composite materials that make stronger and lighter fenders for its sports utility vehicles. Wilson Sporting Goods used nanotechnology materials to make a better golf ball. And Levi Strauss has used nanomaterials from Nano-Tex LLC to weave teflon within fabric to create stain-resistant Levi's Dockers pants.

"This is happening much faster than I thought," said Stan Williams, a research fellow at Hewlett-Packard. "I keep telling people that nanotechnology won't occur in a nanosecond. I never could have believed three years ago that we would be where we are now."

The broader public views nanotechnology with a mixture of hope and fear. As far back as the 1980s, nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler, author of "Engines of Creation," speculated about the fears and hopes of the technology. He hoped that nanotechnology would result in the ability to create tiny machines that could assemble any scarce commodities such as food or precious metals, eliminating the need in the long run for humans to do any work. Yet he also feared "engines of destruction" could be created. The quest to create nanoweapons, he thought, might result in tiny machines that could wreak havoc on a molecular level and turn the world into a "gray goo." Bill Joy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, raised the public fear of nanotechnology higher in an article in the April, 2000, issue of Wired. The article, entitled, "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us," argued that the pace of innovation in nanotechnology would eventually be a threat to the future of the human race. And in 2002, Michael Crichton's novel Prey brought the fears home in a story about micro-robots escaping from a lab.

Meanwhile, nanotechnology became real. In 1989, IBM researcher Don Eigler was able to use a scanning tunneling microscope to create the letters "IBM" by moving around atoms. In 1991, Japanese scientist Sumio Iijima discovered carbon nanotubes, a structure that could be used to build the tiniest electrical wires.
In 2000, President Bill Clinton authorized a major nanotechnology initiative to ensure that the U.S. would compete with other nations. Funding has grown to $982 million a year. The state of New York is offering incentives for companies to join its nanotechnology center of excellence in the Albany region. Other countries in Europe and Asia are also pouring huge resources into nanotechnology initiatives. The National Science Foundation predicted that the worldwide market for nanotechnology products and services could be a $1 trillion industry by 2015.

Good or bad, nanotechnology is moving forward. Sometimes the result is disappointing. Nanosys, a nanotechnology start-up in Palo Alto, Calif., tried to raise $106 million last year in an initial public offering, but investors shied away from the deal because Nanosys had little revenue and was losing money. The company pulled the IPO in August, 2004, and decided to rely upon private capital for the time being.

But as the aforementioned examples of commercial research show, nanotechnology has moved well beyond the federal national laboratories and universities where initial research started decades ago. But how soon nanotechnology really pays off depends on how you define it. Robert Morris, the recently retired director of the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., considers some of the current commercial uses to be more like designer chemistry than true nanotechnology applied to information technology.

Nanotechnology manufacturing isn't expected to replace traditional methods for making silicon chips until 2013 to 2019, according to Ken David, director of computer research at Intel's technology and manufacturing group. And there is still a long way to go before the real payoff of nanotechnology materializes in nanocomputers that are assembled on the molecular level. Researchers say it will be some time before experiments in exotic devices using "quantum computing" become commercial products.

Beyond the mainstream applications of nanotechnology, scientists like Williams expect that nanotechnology will ultimately become useful in information technology applications. Among the companies working on IT nanotechnology are IBM, Motorola, HP, Lucent, and Hitachi. Their work isn't finished, but it still shows promise, said Mark Ratner, a professor of chemistry at Northwestern University and author of "A Gentle Guide to Nanotechnology." National labs such as Sandia, Oak Ridge, Argonne, Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore are also hard at work on nanotechnology. Among the projects are efforts to create an artificial retina, nanoscale microchips, and replacements for a range of electronic devices from light-emitting diodes to nano computers.

On the nanotechnology manufacturing front, one early application is in the creation of new tools for making chips and displays. Researchers also foresee basic advances in memory chips that hold much more data than today's flash memory chips as well as new kinds of sensors that can be built into any kind of device. While some of the manufacturing tools are available now, many of the information technology applications will take some years to get to the market.

"If you're talking about a complete nano computer made from the ground up, we're talking a very long term project," said Meyya Meyyappan, director of the Center for Nanotechnology at the NASA/Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. "Other markets are near term, but information technology falls into the long-term category."

Still, the characteristics of materials that are created atom by atom, or from the bottom up, rather than chiseled down from larger materials in a "top down" fashion, could be breathtaking, Meyyappan said. He notes that carbon nanotubes can withstand 1,000 times more heat than the copper wire now used in chips.
Carbon nanotubes assemble themselves like spaghetti noodles at the moment, but if researchers figure out how to make the nanotubes connect exactly where they want, they will be able to use them in mass-produced electronic devices.
Storage devices could also benefit from nanotechnology; in some sense, the giant magnetoresistive heads for hard disk drives already operate in the nano world because they involve manipulation of magnets on a nanometer scale. But further out are devices that employ nano structures such as IBM's Millipede, which could allow a storage device to use a thousand read/write heads instead of just one, Morris said.

All of this technology innovation has been a long time coming. Consider the case of Applied Nanotech, a small company with 20 employees in Austin, Texas, that was first incorporated to pursue nanotechnology in 1987. A subsidiary of Nano-Proprietary, Applied Nanotech went public in 1993 and obtained more than 40 patents on nanotechnology. Applied Nanotech plans to use carbon nanotubes to create better field emission displays for flat panel television sets. The company has been working for seven years to develop the technology and license it to a large consumer electronics manufacturer. The technology uses carbon nanotubes to emit electrons which in turn can be used to create a much brighter display that uses less energy than conventional liquid crystal or plasma displays.

Another promising area is nanoimprinting, which seeks to replace traditional photolithography in the manufacture of semiconductors. Nanoimprinting gets its name from the fact that it resembles printing, except is on a much smaller scale. The process involves creating a pen-like device with a scanning probe that can place chemicals, dubbed "ink," at precise locations on a substrate.
That master pen is copied over and over again so that it can become like a big stencil that can stamp features out across a wide substrate repeatedly. Since this can write features at much smaller feature sizes on the order of 10 or 20 nanometers, it could one day compete with silicon.

Hewlett-Packard is experimenting with nanoimprinting technology now in hopes of using it to create more efficient electronic components for its printers, said Williams. But there are other start-ups like Chicago-based NanoInk that are using the technology in semiconductor manufacturing. NanoInk began deploying its Dip Pen Nanolithography product last year that can be used to help repair flaws in conventional photolithography masks. These $100,000 machines can be used to fix the masks.

Williams anticipates that information technology companies will benefit from nanoimprinting because it can be used to construct molecular-scale memory chips.
He also believes that it can be used to create tiny sensors that can be built into radio tags and attached to just about anything that needs to be tracked, from retail items that carry bar codes to trees that can alert forest rangers if they are burning. Those sensors will be used to detect pathogens in the air such as anthrax spores.

There are approximately 100 companies making tools for nanotechnology today, with about two thirds of them selling devices. Imago Scientific Instruments, based in Madison, Wis., makes 3-D atom-probe microscopes that can discern images of atoms down to a single nanometer. Imago sells its microscopes for about $2 million a piece to semiconductor makers who use them to inspect chips. It also hopes the microscopes will be useful in inspecting data storage or biomaterials devices.

Companies like Intel expect to be using nanotech tools as they move deeper into chip miniaturization. But Paolo Gargini, an Intel fellow and director of technology strategy at the world's biggest chip maker, said he doesn't really expect nanotechnology to become more cost effective than conventional silicon manufacturing until about 2015. At that point, conventional lithography is expected to hit its limits with feature sizes around 10 nanometers or so.

"Nanotechnology is something we're planning for and it is happening on a schedule," Gargini said.

Venture capitalists are eager to fund more nanotech companies, and some even say that the future of the technology economy will be tied to nanotechnology. Draper Fisher Jurvetson has funded 17 nanotechnology startups, including several in the tools industries like Imago. Steve Jurvetson noted that Redwood City-based venture capital firm stopped making investments in the Internet in 1999 because it foresaw the bubble. Jurvetson looked around for the next big opportunity and concluded it was nanotechnology.

"If you're going to be a leader, you have to take risks," he said. "But we believe that many of our investments will result in payoffs in the next three years."

Dean Takahashi covers business and technology for the San Jose Mercury News.

**********

DID RICHARD FEYNMAN —€˜INVENT' NANOSCIENCE?

Richard P. Feynman, who is unquestionably one of the major theoretical physicists of the 20th century (he won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1965), was, said Dr. Julian Schwinger, "an honest man, the outstanding intuitionist of our age, and a prime example of what may lie in store for anyone who dares to follow the beat of a different drum."

In a historic lecture Feynman presented in 1959 at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society, he talked about manipulating and controlling things on a small scale.

"It is a staggeringly small world that is below," he said. "In the year 2000, when they look back at this age, they will wonder why it was not until the year 1960 that anybody began seriously to move in this direction—€¦

"Biology is not simply writing information; it is doing something about it. A biological system can be exceedingly small. Many of the cells are very tiny, but they are very active; they manufacture various substances; they walk around; they wiggle; and they do all kinds of marvelous things—€”all on a very small scale. Also, they store information. Consider the possibility that we too can make a thing very small which does what we want—€”that we can manufacture an object that maneuvers at that level!

"Now, you might say, —€˜Who should do this and why should they do it?' Well, I pointed out a few of the economic applications, but I know that the reason that you would do it might be just for fun. But have some fun! Let's have a competition between laboratories. Let one laboratory make a tiny motor which it sends to another lab which sends it back with a thing that fits inside the shaft of the first motor."

Feynman, who died in 1988, did like to have fun. "Physics," he said, "is like sex. Sure it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it."

The mathematician Marc Kac said of Feynman: "There are two kinds of geniuses:
the —€˜ordinary' and the —€˜magicians.' An ordinary genius is a fellow whom you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they've done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with magicians. Even after we understand what they have done it is completely dark. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest calibre."