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CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Sept. 30, 2003 — The titans of corporate America and academia embraced nanotechnology at one of the premier R&D conferences recently, even as they cautioned that true nanoscale devices and widespread adoption are still years away.
The research and business heads of General Electric Co, Dell Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., Pfizer Inc. and others spoke at the Emerging Technologies Conference 2003, to discuss their latest thoughts on R&D trends and what specific technologies they see as most promising. The conference drew several hundred people and was hosted by Technology Review, a research publication managed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Nanotech featured prominently in almost everyone’s long-term research plans. GE Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt said he counts nanotech as one of the three fundamental innovations his company plans to explore in coming years. He estimated that by 2020, nanotech will be a $35 billion market.
“I think that by the end of this decade you’ll start to see some real traction,” he said. “Nanotech is absolutely critical to where we want to go.”
Immelt and others, however, repeated the business community’s long-held assumption that the first real market applications will be coatings and nanomaterials. Until scientists can perfect nanomanufacturing on the nanoscale — which they described as inevitable but not immediate — true nanoscale devices and products are still further in the future.
“It doesn’t work yet,” said Nathan Myhrvold, former head of research at Microsoft Corp. and now managing director of Intellectual Ventures. “We’re still a couple of breakthroughs away before we start the march of progress.”
But, Myhrvold added, he still has high hopes for small technology. As tongue-in-cheek proof, he noted that the number of times the word “nanotech” appears in scientific journals now has a compound annual growth rate of 27 percent.
Manufacturing problems were a dominant theme during talks about nanotechnology. Many companies dabbling in nanotech are still flummoxed by how to create structures with dimensions smaller than 50 nanometers at all, let alone how to do so affordably and reliably. Several startup businesses were on hand to present their techniques, such as nano-imprint lithography and liquid embossing.
Colin Bulthaup, co-founder of Kovio Inc. in Silicon Valley, suggested that just as photolithography is used in different ways to make different semiconductor components, “you’ll see the same thing in the nanotech range… a lot of different techniques will be at play” depending on the size of the desired nanostructure.
Kovio is developing a technology that prints semiconductor meterials onto a chip, akin to the way newspapers are rolled off quickly and cheaply from a template. The company has raised $7 million in venture capital so far.
Nano-imprint lithography (NIL), meanwhile, is the core technology of Nanonex Inc. in Monmouth Junction, N.J. NIL uses molds to stamp patterns onto a substrate. Stephen Chou, the company’s founder, says NIL can shape features as small as 2 nanometers.
Stanley Williams, director of quantum science research at Hewlett-Packard (HP), shed more light on his company’s efforts to develop molecular electronics. His first conclusion: accept the fact that any nanoscale device will have imperfections, and engineer the device so that it still performs well anyway.
“It’s going to be impossible to make things work perfectly,” he said.
HP, for example, is trying to craft memory chips that could hold as much as 1 terabit of data per square centimeter. But at such small scale — where nanowires hover above substrates littered with extra atoms — perfectly smooth and clear surfaces cannot be reproduced. “The atomic scale imposes roughness,” he said.
But once molecular electronics are developed, Williams said, he expects them to appear first in hybrid memory chips printed atop traditional CMOS designs. Eventually more layers of molecular electronics will be stacked atop each other, and the CMOS foundation will serve merely as a substrate.
Williams also voiced another popular sentiment among R&D chiefs in attendance, that government spending to fight terrorism will bolster nanotech because nanoscale devices can be well suited to combat terrorism’s steathly nature. Specifically, sensors with various nanostructures to detect chemical or biological hazards are likely to hit the market within three to five years.
“There’s a much stronger incentive to get something out there now,” Williams said.