Tiny Assembly Lines

From a University of Texas - Dallas press release:

Researchers Drafting Plans for Tiny Assembly Lines

A University of Texas at Dallas team will play a key role in a new $15 million research project designed to enable manufacturing at an almost unimaginably small scale: one atom at a time.

"This breakthrough technology will make it possible to manufacture devices with atomic precision by exploiting our established ability to remove individual hydrogen atoms from a silicon surface using a scanning tunneling microscope," said Robert Wallace, a professor of materials science and engineering in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at UT Dallas and a co-principal investigator in the project.

Known as atomically precise manufacturing, the technique is expected to enable a wide variety of devices and products, including:

• Ultra-low-power semiconductors for cellphones and other wireless communications.
• Sensors with ultra-high sensitivity.
• Data encryption orders of magnitude more secure than existing technology.
• Optical elements that enable unprecedented performance in computing and communications.
• Customized surfaces that would have an array of applications in the biomedical and pharmaceutical industries.
• Nanoscale genomics arrays that would enable a person's complete genetic sequence to be read in less than two hours.

Futuristic technologies such as atomically precise manufacturing are a good example of the initiatives that are part of the University's Strategic Plan. Plans are for more investments in "tomorrow's inventions," especially in the natural sciences, medical sciences and engineering, all areas of great opportunity and impact.

The UT Dallas team will focus its research on perfecting the ability to precisely control the reactions that take place on a silicon surface as the atom-by-atom assembly of a device takes place, said Wallace.

This is still not quite equivalent to molecular manufacturing, but it does represent a major step along the way. And make no mistake, that is the eventual goal of this team.

Perhaps this sort of significant public investment in technologies leading directly toward molecular manufacturing is what causes analysts like this one to say:

Broadly speaking, nanotechnology deals with matter at the atomic and molecular scales. “Atomically precise manufacturing” (APM) is the real business of making things using nanotechnology. There is no more exciting area for investors to be in right now. . .

APM will not only create new opportunities, it will destroy many existing industries. Just as light bulbs and AC electrical power created huge opportunities, they razed whole sectors. Lucrative businesses crumbled, taking their investors’ fortunes with them. . . My goal is to make sure that you don’t wake up one morning to find that your portfolio consists of buggy whips and chemical-based photographic film.

Mike Treder