Nanotechnology is beginning to go bonkers, to the point that the ‘nano’ tag is acquiring a revolutionary charm like ‘.com.’ still for most part, it has remained elusive-a technology of the future with little to show today, except for some misplaced fears about it.

It began in 1990s with ‘holo-‘and ‘cyber-‘followed by the ‘com’ era. The latest trend in corporate nomenclature is attaching the prefix ‘nano’ to associate the firm with the aura of fashion and money surrounding the exciting field of nanotechnology even if the business barely touches the nano world.

DEFINING NANOTECHNOLOGY: Nanotechnology exploits phenomena and structures that can occur only at the nanometer scale, in the length scale of 1to100 nm (scale of single atoms and small molecules), in order to understand, create and use materials, devices and systems with fundamentally different properties and functions.

The objective of this technology is to get essentially every atom in the right place to make structures consistent with the laws of physics that can be specified in molecular detail and have manufacturing costs not greatly exceeding the cost of the required raw materials and energy.

It’s difficult to achieve these objectives simultaneously without using some from of positional assembly (to get the right molecular parts in the right places) and massive parallelism (to keep the costs down).

Positional assembly provides tremendous advantages and is frequently used in normal macroscopic manufacturing today. The same concept is required to be applied at the molecular scale: making parts go where we want by putting them where we want. While earlier proposals achieved massive parallelism through self-replication, convergent assembly will be used for future molecular manufacturing systems.

USING NANOTECHNOLOGY: Nanotechnology includes many techniques to create structures are size scales below 100 nm including those used for fabrication of Nan wires, semiconductor fabrication (such as deep-ultraviolet lithography, electron beam lithography, focused-ion beam machining, atomic layer deposition and molecular vapor deposition) and molecular self-assembly (such as those employing diblock copolymers.).

NEED OF THE HOUR: The old mindset of academia looking at the industry as a cash cow and the industry looking at the academic research as vanity needs to be changed. We should capitalize on the unprecedented opportunity brought by nanotechnology through vigorous participation of the industry and academia. The government should wake up and parther with the industry to set up the infrastructure needed for commercialization of products based on nanotechnology.

According to Business Communications company, An industry research firm, the nanotechnology industry rivals the biotechnology market and is growing twice as fast. This makes nanotech a club that many are eager to join whether they’ve been in vited or not!