NANO TECHNOLOGY

Introduction:

Manufactured products are made from atoms. The properties of those products
depend on how those atoms are arranged. If we rearrange the atoms in coal we can make
diamond. If we rearrange the atoms in sand (and add a few other trace elements) we can
make computer chips. If we rearrange the atoms in dirt, water and air we can make
potatoes.

Today’s manufacturing methods are very crude at the molecular level. Casting,
grinding, milling and even lithography move atoms in great thundering statistical herds.But
you can't really snap them together the way you'd like.

In the future, through nanotechnology we'll be able to snap together the fundamental
building blocks of nature easily, inexpensively and in most of the ways permitted by the
laws of physics. This will be essential if we are to continue the revolution in computer
hardware beyond about the next decade, and will also let us fabricate an entire new
generation of products that are cleaner, stronger, lighter, and more precise.

The word "nanotechnology" has become very popular and is used to describe many
types of research where the characteristic dimensions are less than about 1,000 nanometers.
If we are to continue these trends we will have to develop a new manufacturing technology
which will let us inexpensively build computer systems with mole quantities of logic
elements that are molecular in both size and precision and are interconnected in complex
and highly idiosyncratic patterns. Nanotechnology will let us do this. Through
Nanotechnology we can

• Get essentially every atom in the right place.

• Make almost any structure consistent with the laws of physics that we can
specify in molecular detail.
• Have manufacturing costs not greatly exceeding the cost of the required raw
materials and energy.

There are two more concepts commonly associated with nanotechnology:

• Positional assembly.
• Massive parallelism.

Clearly, we would be happy with any method that simultaneously achieved the first
three objectives. However, this seems difficult without using some form of positional
assembly (to get the right molecular parts in the right places) and some form of massive
parallelism (to keep the costs down).

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 The need for positional assembly implies an interest in molecular robotics, e.g.,
robotic devices that are molecular both in their size and precision. These molecular scale
positional devices are likely to resemble very small versions of their everyday macroscopic
counterparts. Positional assembly is frequently used in normal macroscopic manufacturing
today, and provides tremendous advantages.

One robotic arm assembling molecular parts is going to take a long time to assemble
anything large — so we need lots of robotic arms: this is what we mean by massive
parallelism. In this process vast numbers of small parts are assembled by vast numbers of
small robotic arms into larger parts, those larger parts are assembled by larger robotic arms
into still larger parts, and so forth. If the size of the parts doubles at each iteration, we can
go from one nanometer parts (a few atoms in size) to one meter parts (almost as big as a
person) in only 30 steps.

Molecular Manufacturing OR Molecular Nanotechnology:

Introduction:

Manufactured products are made from atoms. The properties of those products
depend on how those atoms are arranged. Viewed from the molecular level today's
macroscopic manufacturing methods are crude and imprecise. Casting, milling, welding
and all the other traditional manufacturing methods spray atoms about in great statistical
herds. Even lithography (which already lets us put millions of transistors on a chip no
bigger than your fingernail) is fundamentally statistical and random. Exactly how many
dopant atoms are in a single transistor and exactly where each individual dopant atom is
located is neither specified nor known: if we have roughly the right number in roughly the
right place, we can make a working transistor. For today, that is good enough.

The exception is chemistry. Large high purity crystals can have almost every atom
in the right place. So, too, can many long polymers. The structures of proteins with
hundreds and even thousands of amino acids can be specified down to the last atom. Most
dramatically DNA strands with many tens of millions of bases can be copied with almost
perfect accuracy. And it seems that almost any small molecule can be synthesized, if only
we have the skill and patience.

Yet the laws of physics and chemistry in principle permit arranging and rearranging
the elements in so many combinations and permutations that all of our manufacturing skills
and all of our chemical skills barely suffice to scratch the surface of what is possible.

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The Utility of Diamond

Almost any manufactured product could be improved, often by several orders of

magnitude, if we could precisely control its structure at the molecular level. We often want
our products to be light and strong. Diamond is light and strong: the strength-to-weight
ratio of diamond is over 50 times that of steel. Yet we do not today have diamond spars in
airplanes nor diamond hulls for rockets. Today we can't economically make diamond. Even
if we could, simple diamond crystals can shatter. We'd have to modify the structure to make
it tough and shatter proof: perhaps diamond fibers. While easily done in principle, we can't
do this in practice today.

Great strength is only one property that we prize highly: when we make computers
we are more concerned by electrical properties. Here, too, diamond excels. Today's
computers are made of semiconductors, and the semiconductor of choice is silicon. This is
not because silicon is the ideal semiconductor from which to make computers, but because
we know how to make devices from it. The computer industry has strong opinions about
what makes a good logic device and what makes a good computer and diamond will let us
make better computers than silicon Diamond has a wider bandgap, hence electrical devices
will work at higher temperatures. It has greater thermal conductivity, so devices can be
more easily cooled. It has a greater breakdown field, hence devices can be smaller. It has
higher electron and hole mobility which, when combined with higher electric fields, will
result in higher speed. But again, we see no diamond computers, just as we see no diamond
airplanes: we can't economically manufacture them yet. Large pure crystals of silicon can
be made relatively easily, but large pure crystals of diamond are scarce. We can etch the
silicon surface and add dopants with a precision measured in tenths of microns, while the
corresponding steps for diamond are more difficult. Not more difficult in principle: just
more difficult today.

Long Range Complex Order

Making computers highlights another problem. It's not enough to make a pure
crystal, it must also have an extremely precise and complex pattern of impurities. The exact
location of the dopant atoms in the semiconductor lattice controls how devices function
and where signals can propagate. Local order is crucial to make each device work, but long
range complex order is crucial to make the computer as a whole work. While we can make
some things today that are highly precise and have simple long range order (e.g., crystals),
it is the requirement for complex long range order that prevents us from making computers
of the kind we'd like to make. While it's plausible we could make high density memory
from crystals and perhaps some types of cellular automatons, we couldn't make anything
that resembled the computers on the market today. Today's high speed semiconductor-
based digital computers (like the 80486 or the Pentium) have millions of logic elements
wired together in complex and highly idiosyncratic patterns. This is well beyond the

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capabilities of crystal growth or bio-polymer synthesis. It will require a fundamentally new
manufacturing technology: molecular manufacturing.

The Interest of the Computer Industry

The attraction of molecular manufacturing for the computer industry should be

clear. It should let us make computers at a manufacturing cost of less than a dollar per
pound, operating at frequencies of tens of gigahertz or more, with linear dimensions for a
single device of roughly 10 nanometers, high reliability, and energy dissipation (using
conventional methods) of roughly 10^-18 joules per logic operation. If we make
thermodynamically reversible computers then the energy dissipation per logic operation
can be reduced to well below kT at T = 300 Kelvins (well below 10^-21 joules).

The computer industry is spending billions of dollars to make better computers. It is

widely acknowledged within the industry that lithography is approaching its limits. There
is already interest in molecular logic devices and that interest will increase sharply as
improvements in conventional manufacturing methods become increasingly difficult.
However, any new proposal for manufacturing molecular computers will be weighed
against (at least) the criteria mentioned above. If it cannot easily beat conventional methods
after they have been pushed to their uttermost limits, then it will be rejected. The computer
industry will soon be pouring vast sums into research aimed at molecular computing, but
the great bulk of funding will go towards well thought out proposals that offer a realistic
possibility of substantially exceeding the performance of the ultimately evolved silicon
VLSI technology that we expect to develop over the next decade.

How We Make Diamond Today

Today, we can synthesize diamond at low pressure and low temperature by using
CVD (Chemical Vapor Deposition) methods. Diamond CVD growth involves highly
reactive species (radicals, carbenes, etc.) in a gas over the growing diamond surface that
bombard and react with that surface at random. Because reaction sites are random, growth
of many defect structures occurs (dislocations, etc.) as well as the desired perfect diamond
structure.
Two fundamental mechanisms in the growth process include

1. Abstraction of hydrogen’s from the diamond surface leaving behind reactive sites.
2. Interaction of carbon species as well as relatively uncreative species with the
surface, thus depositing carbon.

Conclusion

The long term goal of molecular manufacturing is to build exactly what we want at
low cost.

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Convergent assembly

Introduction
Nanotechnology can make big things as well as small things. An attractive approach
is to use convergent assembly, which can rapidly make products whose size is measured in
meters starting from building blocks whose size is measured in nanometers. It is based on
the idea that smaller parts can be assembled into larger parts, larger parts can be assembled
into still larger parts, and so forth. This process can be systematically repeated in a
hierarchical fashion, creating an architecture able to span the size range from the molecular
to the macroscopic.

Convergent assembly covers a class of many different architectures.. The present

proposal is simpler while retaining the desirable performance characteristics described in
Nanosystems

Convergent assembly

It's common to make bigger things by assembling them from smaller things. A
finished assembly which is about 1 meter in size might be made from eight smaller
subassemblies each of about 0.5 meters in size. To make a 1 meter cube, we'd need to
assemble eight smaller cubes, each of 0.5 meters in size. This relationship holds
approximately for many products.

We could assemble our eight subassemblies into a finished assembly by using one or
more robotic arms (or other positional devices) in an assembly module (depicted abstractly
in figure 1)..

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Figure 1: a single assembly module able to accept subassemblies from the four input ports
to the right, and which produces a finished assembly to the left through the single output
port. If the output port has a size of one meter by one meter, each input port would have a
size of 0.5 meters by 0.5 meters.

This process could be repeated. We might take 64 sub-subassemblies, each with a

size of about 0.25 meters, assemble them into 8 subassemblies, each with a size of about
0.5 meters, and finally assemble the 8 subassemblies into the finished assembly, with a size
of about 1.0 meters. This could be done using the system shown in figure 2, which depicts
a 1.0 meter assembly module connected to four 0.5 meter assembly modules.

Figure 2: two stages of assembly starting with 64 sub-subassemblies with a size of about
0.25 meters, producing 8 subassemblies with a size of about 0.5 meters, and producing a
finished product with a size of about 1.0 meters.

Let's assume that the final stage (which assembles the subassemblies into the final
product) takes about 100 seconds.If the 1.0 meter assembly module takes 100 seconds, then
the 0.5 meter assembly module should complete one subassembly in 50 seconds. This is
because an object which is half the size can finish a movement of half the length in half the
time: it's frequency of operation is doubled (see (Drexler,1992) for a discussion of scaling
laws). Each 0.5 meter assembly module can therefore produce two subassemblies in 100
seconds. The four 0.5 meter assembly modules can finish eight subassemblies in 100

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seconds, which means that both the 1.0 meter assembly module and the four 0.5 meter
assembly modules must work for 100 seconds to produce the final product.

This process can, of course, be continued. Figure 3 shows three stages of this
process, in which 512 sub-sub-subassemblies are assembled in 16 0.25 meter assembly
modules, making 64 sub-subassemblies; these 64 sub-subassemblies are assembled into 8
subassemblies in 4 0.5 meter assembly modules. Finally, the 8 subassemblies are
assembled into the final product in the single 1.0 meter assembly module.

Figure 3: three stages of convergent assembly produce a final product of ~1.0 meters in
size from 512 sub-sub-subassemblies each of which is ~0.125 meters in size.

Again, the 0.25 meter assembly modules operate twice as fast as the 0.5 meter
assembly modules, and four times as fast as the 1.0 meter assembly module. The 16 0.25
meter assembly modules can make 64 sub-subassemblies in the same time that the 4 0.5
meter assembly modules can make 8 subassemblies, which is the same amount of time that
the single 1.0 meter assembly module takes to produce the finished product.

We can keep adding stages to this process until the inputs to the first stage are as
small as we might find convenient. For the purposes of molecular manufacturing, it is
convenient to assume that these initial inputs are ~one nanometer in size.

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Conclusions

Convergent assembly is based on the idea that smaller parts can be successively
assembled into ever larger parts. The particular architecture proposed should be able to
produce meter-sized products in a few minutes from nanometer-sized parts while going
through about 30 stages. At each stage the parts are approximately double the size of the
parts from the previous stage and half the size of the parts in the succeeding stage.

Engines of Creation
The Coming Era of Nanotechnology

ENGINES OF HEALING

WE WILL USE molecular technology to bring health because the human body is
made of molecules. The ill, the old, and the injured all suffer from mis-arranged patterns of
atoms, whether mis-arranged by invading viruses or passing time. Devices able to
rearrange atoms will be able to set them right. Nanotechnology will bring a fundamental
breakthrough in medicine.

From Drugs to Cell Repair Machines

Being made of molecules, and having a human concern for our health, we will apply
molecular machines to biomedical technology. Biologists already use antibodies to tag
proteins, enzymes to cut and splice DNA, and viral syringes to inject edited DNA into
bacteria. In the future, they will use assembler-built nanomachines to probe and modify
cells.

With tools like disassemblers, biologists will be able to study cell structures in
ultimate, molecular detail. They then will catalog the hundreds of thousands of kinds of
molecules in the body and map the structure of the hundreds of kinds of cells. Much as
engineers might compile a parts list and make engineering drawings for an automobile, so
biologists will describe the parts and structures of healthy tissue. By that time, they will be
aided by sophisticated technical AI systems.

Physicians aim to make tissues healthy, but with drugs and surgery they can only
encourage tissues to repair themselves. Molecular machines will allow more direct repairs,
bringing a new era in medicine.

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 To repair a car, a mechanic first reaches the faulty assembly, then identifies and
removes the bad parts, and finally rebuilds or replaces them. Cell repair will involve the
same basic tasks - tasks that living systems already prove possible. These tasks are
Access. White blood cells leave the bloodstream and move through tissue, and viruses enter
cells. Biologists even poke needles into cells without killing them. These examples show
that molecular machines can reach and enter cells.

Recognition. Antibodies and the tail fibers- and indeed, all specific biochemical
interactions - show that molecular systems can recognize other molecules by touch.
Disassembly. Digestive enzymes (and other, fiercer chemicals) show that molecular
systems can disassemble damaged molecules.

Rebuilding. Replicating cells show that molecular systems can build or rebuild every
molecule found in a cell.

Reassembly. Nature also shows that separated molecules can be put back together again..
Replicating cells show that molecular systems can assemble every system found in a cell.

Thus, nature demonstrates all the basic operations that are needed to perform
molecular-level repairs on cells.But systems based on nanomachines will generally be
more compact and capable than those found in nature. Natural systems show us only lower
bounds to the possible, in cell repair as in everything else.

Cell Repair Machines

In short, with molecular technology and technical AI we will compile complete, molecular-
level descriptions of healthy tissue, and we will build machines able to enter cells and to
sense and modify their structures.

Cell repair machines will be comparable in size to bacteria and viruses, but their
more-compact parts will allow them to be more complex. They will travel through tissue as
white blood cells do, and enter cells as viruses do - or they could open and close cell
membranes with a surgeon's care. Inside a cell, a repair machine will first size up the
situation by examining the cell's contents and activity, and then take action. Early cell
repair machines will be highly specialized, able to recognize and correct only a single type
of molecular disorder, such as an enzyme deficiency or a form of DNA damage. Later
machines will be programmed with more general abilities.

By working along molecule by molecule and structure by structure, repair machines

will be able to repair whole cells. By working along cell by cell and tissue by tissue, they
(aided by larger devices, where need be) will be able to repair whole organs. By working
through a person organ by organ, they will restore health. Because molecular machines will
be able to build molecules and cells from scratch, they will be able to repair even cells

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damaged to the point of complete inactivity. Thus, cell repair machines will bring a
fundamental breakthrough: they will free medicine from reliance on self-repair as the only
path to healing.

In practice, repair machines will compare DNA molecules from several cells, make
corrected copies, and use these as standards for proofreading and repairing DNA
throughout a tissue. By comparing several strands, repair machines will dramatically
improve on nature's repair enzymes.

Some Cures

The simplest medical applications of nanomachines will involve not repair but
selective destruction. Cancers provide one example; infectious diseases provide another.
The goal is simple: one need only recognize and destroy the dangerous replicators, whether
they are bacteria, cancer cells, viruses, or worms. Similarly, abnormal growths and deposits
on arterial walls cause much heart disease; machines that recognize, break down, and
dispose of them will clear arteries for more normal blood flow. Selective destruction will
also cure diseases such as herpes in which a virus splices its genes into the DNA of a host
cell. A repair device will enter the cell, read its DNA, and remove the addition that spells
"herpes."

Repairing damaged, cross-linked molecules will also be fairly straightforward.

Faced with a damaged, cross-linked protein, a cell repair machine will first identify it by
examining short amino acid sequences, then look up its correct structure in a data base. The
machine will then compare the protein to this blueprint, one amino acid at a time. Like a
proofreader finding misspellings and strange characters (char#cters), it will find any
changed amino acids or improper cross-links. By correcting these flaws, it will leave a
normal protein, ready to do the work of the cell.Repair machines will also aid healing.
After a heart attack, scar tissue replaces dead muscle. Repair machines will stimulate the
heart to grow fresh muscle by resetting cellular control mechanisms. By removing scar
tissue and guiding fresh growth, they will direct the healing of the heart.

Readers familiar with computers may prefer to think in terms of hardware and
software. A machine could repair a computer's hardware while neither understanding nor
changing its software

From Function To Structure

The reversibility of biostasis and irreversibility of severe stroke damage help to

show how cell repair machines will change medicine. Today, physicians can only help
tissues to heal themselves. Accordingly they must try to preserve the function of tissue. If
tissues cannot function, they cannot heal. Cell repair machines change the central
requirement from preserving function to preserving structure. As I noted in the discussion

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of stroke, repair machines will be able to restore brain function with memory and skills
intact only if the distinctive structure of the neural fabric remains intact. Biostasis involves
preserving neural structure while deliberately blocking function.

From Treating Disease To Establishing Health

Medical researchers now study diseases, often seeking ways to prevent or reverse
them by blocking a key step in the disease process. The resulting knowledge has helped
physicians greatly: they now prescribe insulin to compensate for diabetes, anti-
hypertensives to prevent stroke, penicillin to cure infections, and so on down an impressive
list. Molecular machines will aid the study of diseases, yet they will make understanding
disease far less important. Repair machines will make it more important to understand
health.
Once biologists have described normal molecules, cells, and tissues, properly
programmed repair machines will be able to cure even unknown diseases. Once researchers
describe the range of structures that a healthy liver may have, repair machines exploring a
malfunctioning liver need only look for differences and correct them. Instead of fighting a
million strange diseases, advanced repair machines will establish a state of health.

REFERENCES:- http: //www.googlesearch.com

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