Nanotubes: A short update

These little creations will change the world. Every day there is some announcement about a new application or breakthrough. These are a few of my favorites from the latest headlines in the exiting world of nanotubes:

Record breaking lengths. 2 Centimeters!

Using nanohorns for gene therapy

An exiting future for NANO MEMORY from this article:

• Nanochip uses three-wafer stacked MEMS technology along with arrays of atomic force read/write tips that CEO Gordon Knight said offer 200 times the density of any semiconductor. The company expects volume production by 2010 with 32 Gbytes per die, eventually ramping to 4 Tbytes per die by 2017. "Hopefully by then you'll have 10 to 20 terabytes in your cell phone," Knight said.
• Nanosys is working with Intel and Micron on quantum dot-enabled flash memory. In manufacturing, each mono-layer of quantum dots is electrically isolated, so leakage would only affect one dot. Intel has qualified the technology, which is forecast to be used commercially at the 35-nm node in 2009, according to Nanosys' Peter Garcia.
• Nantero's vision is for NRAM to become a "universal" memory, replacing other forms of memory. CEO Greg Schmergel said it is as fast as SRAM and as dense as DRAM while offering the nonvolatility of flash. The technology, which Nantero licenses to several manufacturing partners, uses carbon nanotubes to create nano-electromechanical bits that are bent up and down via van der Waals forces. It can scale down as far as a single carbon nanotube and is compatible with today's semiconductor manufacturing processes, said Schmergel.
• Texas Instruments CTO Hans Stork agreed that nano will bring some of its greatest impact to memory technology. "SRAM is the most difficult circuit to scale," he said, because of patterning challenges and also because at lower voltages numerous bits begin to fail and corrupt the stored data. Stork's keynote focus on the challenges of design in the deep-submicron world was a strong reminder that chip designers already live in the nanoscale world, counting on new nanotechnologies to enable future generations of electronics.

And my personal favorite quote from this article:

• Jeff Wacker, a futurist with Plano-based Electronic Data Systems Corp., said the evolution of nanotech into the consumer arena will be marked by three phases.

  "I think there's the mild, I think there's the wild, and I think there's the magical," he said.

  At the "mild" end of the scale in the next few years are lighter, stronger, frictionless and more efficient upgrades to existing materials, such as in airplane wings, solar panels and batteries.

  At the "magical" conclusion, 10 years or more down the road, consumers can expect to see nano assemblers, minuscule factories using billions of molecule-size machines to build nearly any product imaginable out of a pile of raw materials.

This concludes another sporadic update from the world of nanotubes as Lance sees it.
Have a good day!