Posted: 3:00 p.m. EST, 3/23/98

RICHARDSON, Texas — Zyvex LLC, a nanotechnology startup, is looking for a job candidate with five to10 years' experience in nanomanufacturing. But the company's management is prepared to compromise on background experience: A solid track record in industrial chemistry or perhaps 10 years in cutting-edge DRAM design could be the ticket.

The fact that Zyvex, which calls itself the world's first nanotechnology firm, has managed to attract significant funding says something about the current ferment of research and speculation surrounding what seems to be a 21st-century field. And you won't have to go out and purchase K. Eric Drexler 's seminal Engines of Creation to get up to speed on the topic — the Web is loaded with a richly interconnected thicket of nanotechnology sites geared for everyone from the general reader to advanced experts in the wide variety of fields on which the movement draws.

A good place to start is the Foresight Institute's Web page , which gives a broad listing of nanotechnology sites as well as information on the Sixth Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology, which will be held next November in Santa Clara, Calif.

Foresight is a nonprofit educational organization formed to promote nanotechnology. Believing that the ability to assemble manufactured products at the atomic and molecular level is just around the corner, the institute, located in Palo Alto, Calif., sponsors activity to "help society prepare for nanotechnology." It is allied with two other nonprofit groups — the Institut e for Molecular Manufacturing and the Center for Constitutional Issues in Technology. The latter is just being formed to pursue public-policy questions.

Building miniature computing devices and molecular "nanocomputers" is one significant subfield of nanotechnology. Indeed, the field has been largely inspired by the success of VLSI processing lines to continually shrink the transistor. After achieving 0.1-micron design capability early in the next century, it will only be another order of magnitude of shrinkage to get to the nanomanufacturing level.

The impending approach of the molecular level has stimulated a wave of interest by electronics research labs. Mitre Corp.'s Web site devoted to this speciality reveals extensive research efforts into electronics-related nanofabrication.

Many of the major universities in the United States now maintain laboratories equipped with equipmen t such as atomic-force microscopes, electron-beam lithographic systems and a wide variety of deposition and etching processes. For example, the University of Cincinnati's Nanoelectronics Laboratory is pursuing nanometer-scale processes using techniques such as focused ion-beam lithography and plasma-assisted etching to pursue small-scale integrated optoelectronic systems.

Nano service
Cornell University's Nanofabrication Facility has been around for more than 15 years, offering nanofabrication services to research projects. The center has strongly developed areas such as integrated optics and micro-electro-mechani-cal systems (MEMS). Stephen Chou's recently formed research group at Princeton University is pursuing Chou's strategy for building single-electron devices. Chou developed the technique at the University of Minnesota's Nano-structure Lab, where he and his colleagues developed a nanoimprint lithography technique that some semiconductor companies are eyeing as a possibility for 0.1 m icron and beyond.

Other research centers listed on Mitre's pages include Massachusetts Institute of Technology's NanoStructures Laboratory, Notre Dame's Microelectronics Lab, Purdue's Nanoscale Physics Laboratory and Stanford's Nanofabrication Facility. Like Cornell's, Stanford's center has developed leading-edge expertise and equipment for ultrasmall device fabrication. The center has its own clean room that handles silicon, gallium arsenide and other materials systems and has provided critical support to research groups both within the university and at other universities and industrial research labs.

Stanford and Cornell are part of the National Science Foundation's National Nano-fabrication Users Network. Other members include Howard University, Penn State and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Mitre itself is funded by the government, along with several other institutions sponsored under the Federally Fund ed Research and Development Centers program, including the Aerospace Corp., MIT's Lincoln Laboratory and the Rand Corp.

Apart from government and university interest in nanofabrication, major semiconductor companies also maintain facilities dedicated to the issues surrounding extremely small fabrication methods. The techniques being developed in these labs are already beginning to pay off. For example, nanofabrication techniques were behind Hitachi Ltd.'s recent achievement of a working 128-Mbit DRAM using single-electron devices.

IBM Corp. offers a gallery of striking images of structures assembled one atom at a time using atomic-force microscopes.

Since the atomic-force microscope is both an imaging and a fabrication device, IBM researchers can take actual images of their creations, which are then computer-enhanced to give imaginative depictions of nanotechnology artifacts. The result is striking examples of the ultimate limits of nanofabrication, including one that shows the letters "IBM" spelled out by lining up individual atoms, and another showing a ring of iron atoms that was used to trap a single electron.

Other Web publishing ventures offer overviews and educational material aimed at informing the public about advances in the field. Wired magazine's Web site has a page devoted to future nanotechnology scenarios that serve to illustrate some of the current research trends. The hypothetical future developments also give the interested layman some indication of the excitement being generated by nanofabrication research.

While current methods are just breaking ground with the individual manipulation of atoms and molecules, the full visionary idea fueling nanotechnology enthusiasts is the possibility of building manufacturing machines and robots on the nanometer scale . Like life forms, which are self-reproducing molecular machines, these hypothetical machines would be able to rapidly build billions of copies of themselves and go to work tirelessly performing the tasks they were programmed for.

NASA nanobots
Thus, one scenario is of a NASA space probe that dumps a container full of nanoscale robots on an asteroid. Their first job: mine metals to reproduce billions of identical robots that then go to work transforming the amorphous chunk of material into a space station.

Other scenarios feature the ability to harness biological processes such as protein replication or DNA information encoding to produce ultradense memories and computing devices.

Other possibilities include nanobots that would circulate through the bloodstream to attack cancer cells, or industrial nanomachines that build superstrong materials one atom at a time.

Though tantalizing, such futurism has also come under attack. Introducing a healthy dose of scientific skepticism, Scientific American recently ran an article questioning whether the field is actually going to deliver in the near term.

That sparked a spirited debate among nanotechnology proponents. The debate is presented online at a page that also presents a concise overview of the field .

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