IBM published impressive news of their ability to create complicated geographical replica of the Earth with features as small as 15 nanometers in last week’s issue of Advanced Materials. When you wrap your head around just how small fabrication methods are these days, its easy to see why there is much excitement in Nanotechnology. Yes, you could fit thousands of these maps on a grain of sand but these feasts of chemical engineering have potential far beyond building microchips.
There are many active areas of research in designing and fabricating nanoscale structures. IBM’s achievements in pattering 3D surfaces marks an important milestone in what is considered a tip based ‘top down’ approach to fabrication. Previous tip based methods were typically very expensive and couldn’t scale features down beyond 30 nanometers. In this recent achievement, the engineering mantra of smaller, cheaper, faster has pushed ever smaller designs further into the scale of possible.
If this trend continues, an age of desktop fabrication and molecular manufacturing could shift decidedly from the realm of hostile criticism to the possibility engineer’s wet dreams manifest. Subsequent generations of a desktop device like this could lead to a revolution in mass customization and perhaps even desktop manufacturing.
Time will tell, but if this certainly qualifies as a sign of things to come.
