Sons And Daughters Of BBCMF Nanotechnology Company/IndustryResearch

[BOREALIS]

A giant step toward infinitesimal machinery

2007-11-07 02:23:00


What are the ultimate limits to miniaturization? How small can machinery--with internal workings that move, turn, and vibrate--be produced? What is the smallest scale on which computers can be built?


With uncanny and characteristic insight, these are questions that the legendary Caltech physicist Richard Feynman [profile] asked himself in the period leading up to a famous 1959 lecture, the first on a topic now called nanotechnology. In a newly announced global Alliance for Nanosystems VLSI (very-large-scale integration), researchers at Caltech's Kavli Nanoscience Institute (KNI) in Pasadena, California, and at the Laboratoire d'Electronique et de Technologie de l'Information-Micro- and Nano-Technologies (CEA/LETI-MINATEC) in Grenoble, France, are working together to take the pursuit of this vision to an entirely new level.

For about three decades after Feynman's lecture, scientists paid little heed to what was apparently viewed as his fanciful dreams in this regard. But more recently, particularly in the past two decades, the field of nanotechnology has been solidly established. Underlying this is an immense amount of careful research, carried out in laboratories worldwide-work that has been realized one advance at a time.


http://www.nanotechnology.com/news/?id=11642