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The Ultimate in Miniaturization
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# : |
13009 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1987 |
3,959 Words |
| Author
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Patrick Huyghe
Patrick Huyghe is a science journalist and producer currently
working for Innovation, a science series, on WNET, the public
television affiliate for the New York metropolitan area. |
Late twentieth-century life has been profoundly influenced by electronic products whose growing sophistication and versatility can be traced in large part to the steep curve of ever-greater miniaturization of electronic components. The trend is clear - the large, bulky, primitive equipment of an earlier generation is getting ever smaller, more reliable, and more capable.
Within the last twenty years, we have become accustomed to transistor radios that easily fit into a man's shirt pocket or a woman's evening purse, hearing aides that can be hidden in an earlobe, and thumbnail-sized silicon chips from which one can retrieve quantities of information equal to the contents of a medium-sized book.
In just forty years, computer have been compacted from occupying full rooms to fitting into a neat desktop module. Heavy, temperamental, energy-hungry radios have been replaced by light, portable, high-fidelity radio or cassette players. Slow, local phone service has been partially replaced by fast, clear satellite communication with the other side of the world.
Now, as the electronics industry continues its assault of the ultrasmall, it is fueling a revolution in the technology of making extremely small things. Lying just beyond the now everyday world of microelectronics - with components on the order of micrometers, millionths of a meter - is the nascent field of even smaller nanoelectronics, with components on the order of billionths of a meter. In this Lilliputian world, objects are far smaller than the head of a pin, far smaller than the diameter of a human hair, far smaller even than a human blood cell. Here, the basic unit of measure, the nanometer, is equal to about ten hydrogen atoms placed end-to-end.
Nano, derived from the Greek term for "dwarf," has also come to mean "a billionth." Thus, a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter, or inversely, a meter contains one billion nanometers, and a millimeter contains one million nanometers. An inch contains about twenty-five million nanometers.
For those who are skeptical about the possibility of such man-made supersmall structures, scientists participating in nanoelectronics research recall that fifteen years ago few observers took the possibility of the development of today's commonly used desktop personal computers seriously. Nanotechnologist Fabian Pease of Stanford University says it may become possible to store for easy retrieval the entire contents of all books and other documents
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