Running Out of Time

CRN Director of Research Chris Phoenix is currently attending a week-long IEEE Conference on Nanoscale Devices & System Integration in Miami, Florida. Chris will present a paper titled "Studying Molecular Manufacturing" at the conference later this week, and he'll be updating us with his impressions every day or two. Here is his first report:

It's amazing how far things have come in a year or two. Much farther than I had expected. I'm actually out of date! The last I knew, dip-pen nanolithography was a cutting-edge proposal, and drug design was an arcane art. One person literally laughed at me for the latter opinion. And a MEMS researcher mentioned DPN, a bit dismissively, as a "standard" (or was it "conventional"?) lithography technology.

If you go to a foundry, see a statue you like in brass, and ask them if they can cast it in iron, they'll probably say, "Sure." They've been working with metals for decades, so the form is almost independent of the process. Well, the same thing is happening—strike that, it already has happened—with even the most recent nano-lithography processes. I asked someone if he could take his cutting-edge silicon MEMS work and redesign it in two-photon stereolithographic polymer, and he said, "Sure."

I then asked him if he could design me a four degree of freedom SPM system. He had to think about that one, and in the end he wasn't sure. But just a year or two ago, it would have been unthinkable.

So, when the "Nanhattan Project" finally gets started, it will have absolutely no problem finding not only dozens of nanoscale techniques, but people willing and able to combine them. These are not world-class researchers—they're grad students and postdocs. Well, maybe these days the grad students are the world-class researchers. No wonder the dinosaurs are scared.

The coolest thing I saw today, though, was a set of technologies—all from the same lab—for using light on semiconductor chips. Remember the sub-wavelength techniques I wrote about in the last C-R-Newsletter? Add these to the list, at the top.

It used to be thought that light had to travel in a space large enough for its wavelength. Nope! Make a very narrow trench—50 nanometers, maybe 1/10 or 1/20 of a wavelength—and the light will be quite happy traveling along the overlapping electron clouds from the sides of the trench (or something like that). Unlike optical fibers, the light travels through the region with the lower index of refraction.

To link a 0.05-nm trench to a 10-micron fiber, do you just butt them together? No, that transfers at most 3% of the light. Do you use a gradually widening cone? You can, but it'll take a very long distance. The right answer is to narrow the thing still further, making a needle only 20 nm long—and the light escapes out the sides, and up to 95% of it goes into the fiber; they've already demonstrated 70% transfer, and it's relatively insensitive to misalignment.

As far as I know, this doesn't have much to do with molecular manufacturing, or even with enabling technologies for it. I describe it because first, it's incredibly cool; and second, it's evidence that the previous stuff—nanolithography, chemistry, manipulation—is already a mature field, no longer so cutting-edge. Still lots to learn, but it's ready for application.

In the poster session, one group reported a fuel cell they'd made with microporous silicon, gold-plated on one side, sandwiching a membrane common enough to have a trade name. It's a square centimeter and 800 microns thick, produces a quarter watt, and runs on methanol at room temperature with high efficiency. I asked if this was commercially competitive: "Oh, Yeah!" Is this a highly funded fuel cell research team? No, it's a few students in a lab, working on something else entirely. They just did the fuel cell thing "for fun." Next I wandered over to the bookstore table, noticed a book on fuel cells, opened it at random... "All low and medium temperature fuel cells require pure hydrogen." The book was published two years ago.

Tomorrow morning I'm going to hear talks on:
- Atom beam lithography: proximity printing for the sub-10-nm domain.
- Nanorobotic manipulation and manufacturing systems.
- Design principles for self-assembling devices from macromolecules.

Could we have diamondoid molecular manufacturing in five years? There's no doubt in my mind that we could. If we really tried, we might have it in three. Of course, that doesn't mean we will—but the important technologies are mature enough to be portable, so if we don't, someone else will... soon.

We're rapidly running out of time to prepare.

Comments

[Mike Deering]

If you think things are moving fast now, wait six months. They will be moving even faster.

[Reason]

Fast in science doesn't necessarily translate into fast in bringing to market. The process of commercializing a new advance is a laborious and slow one. I comment on this in relation to life extension medicine in this post at Fight Aging, but I think that the same principles apply here.

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/000012.php

It's easy to be dazzled by the raw speed of science nowadays - and then be left wondering where all those advances went two or three years later. There's a lot of reporting on science, and far too little reporting on the process of commercialization.

Reason
Founder, Longevity Meme

[Mr. Farlops]

I agree with Reason. Despite the increasing rate scientific discovery due to improvements in instrumentation and the arrival of the Internet, getting these things out in the real world takes much more time than you'd expect given the slowness of business, capitol gathering and governmental approval.

Obviously government can always be made more efficient but rather than flog that increasingly cliched horse what can be done to speed up and improve the efficiency of capitalism and business? (It was always one of my old jokes, having seen the really silly things done in successful businesses both large and small, that capitalism is only marginally more efficient that socialism.) So what do we do? Replace all the MBAs with expert systems? Ban all useless dilbert-esque meetings? Require marketing to stop wasting time on f2f and pointless convention going?

[Chris Phoenix, CRN]

There are lots of different markets. And the market is only one way for things to get used. There's also military applications, semi-planned economies, hobbyists...

Molecular manufacturing won't be an incremental advance. Its products will be many orders of magnitude ahead of their competitors. And it'll have a huge number of possible applications, so even if just a small fraction are adopted quickly, it'll still be able to make a huge difference.

If the Powers That Be wanted nanofactories to be adopted rapidly, it would be very simple. Just build a small nanofactory with a few brightly colored preprogrammed buttons and a "starter cartridge" of feedstock sufficient to make a few inflatable toys.

Then put one in every Happy Meal(TM). Include a note to the parents that for only $29.99 activation fee, plus overpriced refills, plus licensing costs, they can plug the nanofactory into the USB port of any Windows computer and download additional product designs.

Chris

[Reason]

All of the above is true of many other industries...but I think we'll never see it happen in reality until there are speeding advances in basic business processes and human interactions common to all attempts to enact large scale changes, top down or bottom up.

Each of the comparatively simple, glossed over logistics exercises in your example above would require a few years to put together, even if the technology is in hand.

Reason
Founder, Longevity Meme

[Derek Lowe]

That person who laughed at you for saying that drug design was an arcane art - were they, by any chance, actually employed in the drug design field?

I ask because I am (it's the usual subject of my blog.) And I've been doing it since 1989, and I can tell you that it's still pretty flippin' arcane, most days. If it weren't, we'd have more drugs.

[hey]

um... how is there any need for "regulatory approval" outside of medicine?

you don't need the "feds" to approve 90nm lithography or whatever

you pesssimists need some acquaintance with the real world...

if it actually works, applications come fast...

but the bench is different from a highspeed fab, and thats where issues crop up.. science works but you need the industrial engineering...

although if you have alignment insensitive optics, i can pretty well guarantee some massive funding and a crash implementation, given the typically massive labour usage in optical device manufacturing!

[michael vassar]

The big difference between molecular manufacturing and most science advances is that it can build its own infrastructure for production. Designs are enough with regard to mass production. Markets don't need to be researched because many existing products can be made, just far more cheaply. Much time will be required to build Engines of Creation, (most of it will probably never happen), but weeks or at most months should be all it takes to bring laboratory breakthroughs to mass production and mass distribution.

[Robin Green]

Michael Vassar - what is the distinction you are drawing between "molecular manufacturing" and "engines of creation"? I didn't realise there was one. Or do you mean the outcomes predicted in the book "Engines of Creation"?

[michael vassar]

Engines of Creation predicts certain technologies that require molecular manufacturing for their development, but makes little investigation into how much engineering and/or science said technologies would require Beyond the mere availability of molecular manufacturing. It also promotes a biologically inspired paradigm for molecular manufacturing which is severely dated, relying on somewhat autonomous "nanorobots" finding molecules in a tank and putting them in place. Modern proposals more closely resemble existing mass production techniques.

[Richard Jones]

Robin, I do think there is an important distinction between "Engines of Creation" and "Molecular Manufacturing", though it's not necessarily the one that Michael is making. In Engines of Creation, Drexler proposed radical nanotechnology as a goal - functional devices on the nanoscale, drawing inspiration from cell biology at least at the level that cell biology provides existence proofs. However, Engines is fairly vague about the details of the means proposed to achieve this goal. Then in "Nanosystems" Drexler outlines a very specific means to achieve the goal of radical nanotechnology, involving diamondoid mechanosynthesis and the highly mechanical paradigm that has become associated with the terms MNT, molecular manufacturing etc. I would strongly argue that there are other means - perhaps many other means - by which the goals of radical nanotechnology can be achieved, and MNT may well not be the best one.