The Next Small Thing
July 15, 2001 | Source: Forbes
Scientists are re-creating our world in the realm of the intensely tiny. The potential payoff: denser hard drives, smaller chips, better medicine.
Top research organizations within large companies and renowned universities are inventing the future: electronics as cheap and plentiful as bar codes on packaging; lightweight vests enmeshed with sensors could measure a person’s vital signs; analysis of a patient’s DNA could be done so quickly and precisely that designer drugs could be fabricated on the fly; a computer the size of your library card could store everything you ever saw or said.
Current nanotech research includes:
* IBM: scanning tunneling microscope and “millipede” storage system, which will record more than 400 gigabits of data per sq. in.
* Harvard University: self-assembling 3-D circuit
* University of Texas: protein-controlled semiconductor growth
* Cornell University: lithography to separate DNA fragments and detect whether food is spoiled
* Hewlett-Packard: Carbon nanotubes to create computer chips
* UCLA: chips built from organic molecules
* Yale: self-assembling memory devices, leading to memory so cheap that people will throw away electronics the way they do packaging