Results for ""molecular manufacturing""

from the sniffing-around-with-nanodevices dept.
Gina Miller writes "Accoring to the Detroit News (Sept. 27, 2002), 9-11 drives advances in nanotechnology: 'The events of Sept. 11 have focused awareness, increased funding and accelerated the commercialization of micro- and nanotechnology devices that can sense minute traces of chemical, biological and nuclear agents in the air or water …' The focus of the article is MEMS and microsystems companies that currently produce handheld devices for monitoring air and water quality, and are working on smaller devices. Will homeland security also push development of molecular manufacturing and medical and other nanobots?"

from the Looking-for-roadmaps dept.

larens imanyuel writes "In each phase of the Industrial Revolution a new industrial system has arisen on top of the previous one. Each has involved enabling technology, new organizational principles, and new major product lines. For instance, a century ago electrification with small motors allowed Henry Ford to design the modern assembly line to mass produce automobiles. Several decades ago silicon technology allowed the mass production of personal computers through an exponential refinement of technique, commonly known as Moore's law, that became the Semiconductor Roadmap. The question naturally arises as what the equivalent industrial system will be for the next half century."

from the what's-in-a-name dept.
PatGratton writes with a "fairly radical suggestion" to distinguish molecular manufacturing/molecular nanotechnology, as proposed by Eric Drexler in Engines of Creation and Nanosystems, from other nanoscale science and technologies currently covered by the term nanotechnology. Following is his abstract of his argument. "The full argument is available on my web site: Nanotech vs. Nanotech (Part 1) is intended for a general audience, while Nanotech vs. Nanotech (Part 2) is intended for Feynman/Drexler nanotech advocates. Each document is about two pages."

Gina Miller writes "Business 2.0 June 2002 issue has a feature called "Untangling the Future". The author, Paul Saffo, discusses the difficulty with predicting future technologies due to his observation of non linear progress. He conjectures that advances are "spawned" and "cross pollinated" by others, with this in mind he has created a pdf map of future technologies with new disciplines — for example, Molecular manufacturing or Cognitronics. Also included, a timeline pdf of these future disciplines and another Business 2.0 article that can be linked to at the bottom of the page called 8 Technologies That Will Change the World."

Gina Miller writes "IBM reported using MEMS/NEMS technology to achieve a data storage density of a trillion bits per square inch. The research project, code-named "Millipede," uses an array of 1024 (32 x 32) silicon cantilever AFM tips in a 3-mm square to make indentations 10 nm in diameter in a thin polymer film. Bits are written by heating the cantilever to 400 C, which softens the polymer film, and read at 300 C, where the polymer is not soft. Data is erased by using the tip to surround the data pit with a series of overlapping pits that fill in the old pit. The authors achieved more than 100,000 write/overwrite cycles to demonstrate this capability. They are currently using electronics that achieve kilobit-per-second data rates with individual tips, but expect to do much better with better electronics. A technical report on the Millipede project published in the June 2002 inaugural issue of IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology can be downloaded from the IBM page. Soooo, the big question for nanodot readers, could this AFM array be useful for molecular manufacturing?"