Technology and Science of the Very Small

This is the Poratbo blog. Dr. Richard Feynman coined the phrase “there is plenty of room at the bottom” in the 1959 first meeting of what is now the EIBPN conference. The transcript is online here: https://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html. His theme was that if we looked at engineering down to the atomic level then the possibilities will be endless. To put this in perspective, 1959 was the year Noyce and Hoerni made the first practical planar silicon circuit - a device with details still large enough to be seen by the human eye, and likely unknown to Feynman. Both the vision of the nano-future and its eventual most key enabling technology were launched independently in the same year.

Another influential person in nanotech was Dr. K. Eric Drexler, whose doctoral thesis proposed the idea of nano-assembly at the atomic level using nanotech machines to build. He describes this bootstrapping in the wonderful book “Nanosystems” from 30 years ago, a book which is serious physics and engineering to explore the limits of function, accuracy, speed, composition, and energy use by such devices. He has not been so much in the public eye in recent decades, although the “gray goo” vision of replicating nanobots remains a permanent meme which came from popular interest - and alarm - about the potential of the devices he described, and science fiction from Terminator to The Diamond Age imagined a nanotech future. In a more practical way his work inspired the development of MEMS technologies that add mechanical and optical microstructures to our toolkit, not just electronic circuits.

Even so, we are far from finding all the room Feynman predicted. We have been able to pick and place atoms to some extent since the 1990s, but we are far away from the precise arrangement of atoms, never mind nano-scale replicators. Perhaps on the fringes of biology, DNA and RNA tooling to make designer-protein molecules is the closest we are yet. But we remain sloppy, relative to the atomic ideal. The channel of the smallest transistors in our most advanced computing (quite likely, your mobile phone) are still on the order of 2,000 cubic nanometers, which is roughly 12,000 silicon atoms. Not even close to 1 by 1 atomic assembly.

I will be exploring topics of how various kinds of nanotechnology are built and ways to use them. I will be starting by looking at how a library of basic electronic circuits can be formed in a 4nm-class FinFET process, and how those can be combined in layers to build the main pipeline in a custom blockmining chip. Then I will look at a couple of nanoscale optics projects, and of we go after that into the small blue wonder.