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Almaden Institute Grand Challenges in Nanotechnology, April 23 - 25, 2001
The purpose of this meeting is to develop a set of science and technology grand challenges, which, when met, will help to bring to fruition the enormous but as yet largely unfilled promise of this field. The information collected at this meeting will help guide future funding initiatives, and will also be made available to the public. The meeting will include several invited talks (see confirmed invited speakers below), panel discussions in which we hope you will vigorously participate, presentations from government funding agency representatives, and an opportunity to formulate grand challenges for which more intense research is needed. A brief description of four key grand challenge questions is appended below. We also plan to include a session for contributions from participants. We hope you will want to make a brief presentation to stimulate discussion. This meeting will be attended by some of the leading scientists from academia, industry, representatives from the key government funding agencies (NSF, DARPA, DOE and DOD) and top IBM scientists and managers. The list of confirmed speakers includes:
A number of invitations will also be made to world class "early-in-their-career" scientists. You are invited to nominate such individuals, including senior graduate students and post-doctoral fellows. Please send nominations to Don Eigler. Grand Challenges in Nanotechnology To illustrate the notion of "Grand Challenges in Nanotechnology" here are four major problems, each chosen for its relevance to the continued evolution of information technology. Speakers are invited to explore these grand challenges, or explore others of equal or greater importance. Speakers are welcome to propose challenges with no obvious connection to information technology. Speakers should address the state of the art and possible future evolution of the research, and point to those research problems which, if addressed, would have the greatest impact on the field and eventually on society. New Architectures for Information Systems Even as the rate of technological progress accelerates with increased global competition, the dominant information processing and storage technologies (silicon microelectronics and magnetic storage) are perceived to be approaching physical limits to their further miniaturization and extension. Many new devices are being proposed, as well as new architectures for information processing which, it is hoped, will exploit the characteristics of the new devices. Can we predict the winners? Can architectural innovations ease the daunting task of developing a scalable quantum computer? Can reliable "classical" computers be built from devices based on small numbers of electronic charges or spins, or small numbers of atoms or molecules? Spin-based information processing and storage Major advances in scientific understanding of spin-polarized electron transport has resulted in recent years in exciting industrial applications, most notably, magnetic sensors for hard disk drives. Research and development is now focused on magnetic tunnel junctions, which hold promise to begin replacing semiconductor memory in a little as five years. Both the sensors and the memory devices depend on routine manufacturing of complex layered structures with atomic precision. The magnetic tunnel junctions will soon have lithographically defined lateral dimensions less than 100 nm. At the forefront of scientific research is the possibility of manipulating spins within semiconductor heterostructures, promising entirely new devices. Solid state quantum computers based on quantum confinement of spin-polarized electrons is one example of a potential powerful new spin-based nano-technology. Are there others? Extending manufacturing to the atomic scale. Current silicon transistors or hard disk read heads already contain layered structures with thicknesses controlled in manufacturing to atomic precision. Future information systems will be structured on the atomic or molecular scale in all three dimensions, allowing many orders of magnitude more complexity to be built into a system of a given size. These future nanostructures must be integrated into complex, hierarchically-organized systems, with structure at all length scales from the atomic to the macroscopic. The possibility of engineering individual devices at the atomic and molecular scale has already been realized but the utility of such devices will depend upon inexpensive, high-volume manufacturing processes. What is the optimal balance between lithographic ("top down") and self-assembly ("bottom up") manufacturing processes? Will we someday "grow" things as complex as chips or entire computers, and what new research will take us quickly in that direction? Bio-Synthetic Approaches to New Materials The development of novel materials has been one of the major driving forces behind the miniaturization of storage and logic devices. Information technologies of the future are likely to be dependent upon new nano-structured materials. One exciting new direction is the bio-synthesis of inorganic materials. Biological molecules can provide the information required to produce complex, hierarchically structured materials and devices, but the research is still in its infancy. Can we extend the range of process conditions? What are the design rules which will allow us to build complex structures which meet technological constraints? |
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