NANOTECH
/NOLOGY

"Plenty of Room
at the Bottom"

Caltech, December 29, 1959. Richard Feynman delivers the founding lecture of nanotechnology before the field exists.

Scanning Tunneling
Microscope / 1981

A sharp metal tip hovers a few atomic diameters above a surface. Quantum tunneling current resolves individual atoms.

• Invented by Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer at IBM Zürich
• Nobel Prize in Physics, 1986
• Resolution: lateral ~0.1 nm, vertical ~0.01 nm
• The first instrument to see — and later move — single atoms

"IBM" in xenon
atoms / 1989

Don Eigler and Erhard Schweizer at IBM Almaden positioned 35 xenon atoms on a nickel surface to spell their employer's logo.

Feynman's 1959 conjecture, demonstrated. The image circled the world. From that point on the atomic scale was not just visible — it was writable.

A rolled sheet of
graphene / 1991

Sumio Iijima reports multi-walled carbon nanotubes at NEC. Diameter ~1–100 nm, length up to centimeters.

• Tensile strength ~100× steel at 1/6 the density
• Electrical conductivity rivaling copper
• Thermal conductivity rivaling diamond
• Either metallic or semiconducting depending on chirality

One atom thick / 2004

Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov isolate graphene from graphite using adhesive tape at the University of Manchester.

• Two-dimensional honeycomb lattice of carbon atoms
• Charge mobility ~200,000 cm²/Vs
• ~200× stronger than steel by weight
• Nobel Prize in Physics, 2010

Chemistry does the
building for you.

Push molecules into the right environment and they organize themselves — driven by hydrogen bonding, van der Waals forces, hydrophobic effects.

• DNA origami: a long strand folded by short staples into shapes (Rothemund, 2006)
• Block copolymers: phase separation creates regular nanostructures
• Lipid bilayers: the same self-assembly that built the first cells
• Bottom-up complement to top-down lithography

Patterning silicon
at the atom limit.

The most economically important nanotech: photolithography on silicon. Each generation shrinks the feature size.

• Deep UV (193 nm): printed nodes from 130 nm down to 7 nm via multi-patterning
• EUV (13.5 nm): ASML's twin-lasered tin-droplet light source — the only commercial path below 7 nm
• Current leading nodes: ~3 nm (TSMC, Samsung), with 2 nm in pilot
• "Nodes" are marketing — physical gate pitches are larger, but transistors are nano-scale features

Toxicology hasn't
caught up.

A particle small enough to engineer is small enough to cross membranes you don't want it to cross.

• Nanoparticles can enter cells, cross blood-brain & placental barriers, accumulate in lungs
• Engineered TiO₂, silver, and CNTs raise occupational-exposure concerns
• Environmental persistence: many nanomaterials are designed not to degrade
• Regulation lags — "nano" rarely appears on ingredient labels