ABILITY TO SHRINK STUFF

Another common misconception is that nanotechnology is primarily concerned with making things smaller. This has been exacerbated by images of tiny bulls, and miniature guitars that can be strummed with the tip of an AFM, that while newsworthy; merely demonstrate our newfound control of matter at the sub-micron scale. While almost the whole focus of micro-technologies has been on taking macro-scale devices such as transistors and mechanical systems and making them smaller, nanotechnology is more concerned with our ability to create from the bottom up. In electronics, there is a growing realization that with the end of the CMOS roadmap in sight at around 10 nm, combined with the uncertainly principal's limit of Von Neuman electronics at 2 nm, that merely making things smaller will not help us. Replacing CMOS transistors on a one for one basis with some type of nano device would have the effect of drastically increasing fabrication costs, while offering only a marginal improvement over current technologies.

However, nanotechnology offers us a way out of this technological and financial cul-de-sac by building devices from the bottom up. Techniques such as self assembly, perhaps assisted by templates created by nano imprint lithography, a notable European success, combined with our understanding of the workings of polymers and molecules such as Rotoxane at the nanoscale open up a whole new host of possibilities. Whether it is avoiding Moore's second law by switching to plastic electronics or using molecular electronics, our understanding of the behavior of materials on the scale of small molecules allows a variety of alternative approaches, to produce smarter, cheaper devices. The new understandings will also allow us to design new architectures; with the end result that functionality will become a more valid measure of performance than transistor density or operations per second.