Nanomanufacturing

Nanomanufacturing refers to the fabrication and production of materials, physical structures, or devices with at least one of their dimensions in the range of 1 to 100 nm, in order to produce functional and controllable devices with new properties, phenomena, and behavior.

Nanomanufacturing can be understood as large-scale production of uniform nanoscaled materials, structures, and complex molecular devices, which is realized by implementing the nanotechnology in numerous aspects of the manufacturing processes while maintaining their unique properties. Those properties may be different from the properties of bulk material, single atoms, or molecules because of the unusual physical, chemical, and biological properties that emerge in materials on the nanoscale. Nanomanufacturing refers to industrial-scale manufacturing of nanotechnology-based objects, with emphasis on low cost, precision, and reliability. Nanomanufacturing is distinct from molecular manufacturing, which refers specifically to the manufacture of complex nanoscale structures by means of nonbiological mechanosynthesis and subsequent assembly.

Nanomanufacturing is a hereditary technology from micro-manufacturing, which has been exceedingly successful in many aspects. The most obvious example is microelectronics. Microelectronics entered the nanometer scale in the late 1990s when scientists at IBM's Almaden Research Center in California demonstrated the possibility to control the position of individual atoms. Subsequently, scientists at IBM's Zurich research laboratory showed how to move and precisely position molecules at room temperature using a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) in 1996. These pioneering researchers proved that individual atoms and molecules can directly be manipulated and controlled, and laid the basis for manufacturing materials with improved properties, such as superior strength, higher magnetism, and good thermal conductivity.

With the rapid development of nanotechnology, researchers and engineers are forced to figure out how to scale up the production of promising nanostructures to a commercially useful scale without loosing their unique and valuable properties. To this, a different set of fundamental research issues have been addressed, such as scale-up of assembly processes to production volume, controlling the processes with the reproduction ability of the nanoscaled process techniques, and the reliability and integration of turning nanoscaled structures and devices into large-scaled products. Successful integration of nanomaterials and nanostructures into final products typically entails resolving fundamental issues of physics and chemistry. Therefore, nanomanufacturing may require interdisciplinary cooperation to transfer the technology from the laboratory to commercial products.

The National Nanotechnology Initiative Grand Challenges and the National Science Foundation Workshop on Three Dimensional Nanomanufacturing, held in Birmingham, Alabama, in January 2003, addressed three important issues for nanomanufacturing:

• Control of the assembly of three-dimensional (3D) heterogeneous systems, including the alignment, registration, and interconnection in 3D, and with multiple functionalities.
• Handling and processing nanoscale structures in a high-rate/high-volume manner, without compromising beneficial nanoscale properties.
• Testing the long-term reliability of nanocomponents; and detect, remove, or prevent defects and contamination.

For these three issues, precise control of size, shape, alignment, and integration of nanostructures is fundamental. The fabrication and growth process of the nanostructures must be fully controllable and reproducible. Properties of the final integrated nanodevices need to have well-functioning behavior within an acceptable range. It must be possible to commercialize and mass-produce the products without losing the unique properties. [Page 495]Good and reliable metrological devices for quality control need to be developed and used for testing and checking nanocomponents.

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