Chris Phoenix is providing live blog coverage for us on all the presentations from an important conference on Productive Nanosystems: Launching the Technology Roadmap...
Next talk: Nanotechnology in Singapore: Towards Atomic-Scale Manufacturing
Khiang Wee Lim, Executive Director, Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE), Singapore
Drexler just gave this guy a very positive introduction. The talk is going to be less technical - talking about investment (public and private) and international participation in the Roadmap.
Singapore is at 2.36% R&D as percentage of GDP. They aim to grow that to 3% by 2010. As a small country they have less inertia. They want to add more boxes to the National R&D Framework.
One of a dozen "Technology Scan Areas" is "Exploiting Nanotechnologies."
A slide of "Nanotechnology Industry Strategy" with a lot of text, including things like IP strategy... I apologize to the business people who are interested in this stuff, but I guess I'm just not. .... Oookay, now he's talking about hard disks and value chains... this may be a pretty short post.
OK, that's interesting: under "Data Storage Institute" he lists "Femto slider." That's 10^-15. Clearly not length; maybe volume? If so, it's a length of 10^-5, which is not that small after all.
The nanoelectronics programme shows sub-20 nm devices starting in 2006. That is certainly interestingly small. If nothing else, it should drive a market for nanoscale lab equipment such as microscopes.
He's talking about technologies, but at such a high level that I can't tell how interesting they are. For example, sequential imprinting to control surface properties of polymer films: lotus leaf self-cleaning, etc. Gears: MEMS? NEMS? molecular? Theory or experiment? I can't tell, but he just said the purpose of the work is to demonstrate that mechanical concepts can be translated down to the molecular level. Hm, looks like he's built an actual gear-like molecule, and tried to pin it to defects on a gold surface. Looks quite interesting, but he skipped past the only slide with technical words on it, too fast to see.
Now he's talking about Zyvex-type atomically precise manufacturing. Including "Vertical sidewalls" for 3D silicon structures. That's cool; it means you can build tall things, not just pyramids.
Back to investment... private companies... embedded ID tags for anti-counterfeiting. They thought it would be used on cell phones and Gucci bags; the biggest market turned out to be a company that made automobile air conditioners... that were counterfeited so well that the company couldn't tell which of the warrenty returns were theirs.
Roadmap considerations: Risk, standardization, multiple countries, health&safety issues, etc. Samsung has a washing machine that injects silver ions into wash loads to kill germs; the US EPA has ruled that this is a pesticide and gets regulated along with bug spray.
Countries getting into nanotechnology are hugely diverse. China is an early mover on standards; Taiwan on certification. In Taiwan, "nano" is positive, an advertising point, so the government wants to protect consumers by making sure that "nano" actually contains nano.
Risk framework from IRGC: two frames of reference: Frame 1: Passive things pose e.g. human health, explosion, ecological risks - known types. Frame 2 (active, integrated, & heterogeneous nanosystems) are said to pose new kinds of risk (oops, the slide went away). [I'm thinking most Frame 2 nanostructures won't actually be that interesting.]
By the way, they announced yesterday that the slides from the talks would be put up on a website in the next few weeks; assuming that happens, we'll post the URL on this blog.
Chris Phoenix
Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog
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