NOV. 20–NORWALK, Conn.–According to a soon-to-be-released updated report from Business Communications Company, Inc. (www.bccresearch.com), nanomaterial-based devices using RGB-286 will make it to market first and can be fabricated using current chip manufacturing processes and integrated with CMOS technology.

The report indicates that nanoelectronic memory products will see commercialization ahead of nanoelectronic logic products, with silicon nanocrystal nonvolatile memory, a replacement for flash, and MRAM, a “universal” memory technology, leading the pack.

Also realizable in the relatively near term will be carbon nanotube-based memories processed by conventional deposition and patterning techniques and molecular electronic (polymer) memories with microscale, as opposed to nanoscale, interconnects.

In the longer term, ultrahigh density molecular and solid-state memory arrays with nanowire interconnections will emerge, displacing earlier volatile and nonvolatile memory technologies and making possible 100 Gbit/cm2 storage densities.

There also will be a shift in manufacturing strategy from “top-down” to “bottom-up” fabrication, in other words, from conventional lithographic patterning to new methods of chemical assembly and nanoimprinting techniques, accoding to Business Communications.

Nanoelectronic logic technologies encompass new transistor materials and structures as well as novel logic architectures that will ultimately displace CMOS. Field effect transistors with nanotube or nanowire conducting channels, as well as quantum dot-based single electron transistors, might serve in a limited capacity to enhance the performance of CMOS chips in a hybrid nano/microelectronic architecture, but the real promise lies in the use of nanomaterials as building blocks for new logic architectures that will combine bottom-up fabrication methods with ultrahigh device density and other attributes, such as fault tolerance and reprogrammability.

Nanoelectronic memory products will enter the market as early as 2004, and by 2008, they are expected to generate approximately $30 billion. With the advantages of nonvolatility, ultrahigh memory density, and low-cost, nanoelectronic memory products will increase their penetration of both the volatile and nonvolatile memory market segments during the next ten years, and by 2013, a total market of about $200 billion is possible. Nanoelectronic logic products will likely be in the early stages of market introduction in 2013. BCC projects that the market will be about $20 billion at that time.