The incredible shrinking technology

Originally published 23 September 1991

Wel­come to the nanodecade.

Nano, as in nan­otech­nol­o­gy, nanocom­put­ers, nanorobots.

Nano, as in nanome­ter, or bil­lionth of a meter. Small. Very, very, very small.

In my grand­moth­er’s house a huge Stromberg-Carl­son radio stood against the the liv­ing room wall. It was the size of a church win­dow. The whole fam­i­ly could gath­er around it in the evening lis­ten­ing to Kate Smith or Amos ‘n’ Andy, and my grand­moth­er had a big family.

The radio was big because the elec­tron­ic tubes inside were big. The size of milk bot­tles. And glow­ing red hot.

By the time my par­ents got their own house, radios had shrunk to the size of a bread­box­es. Tubes had got­ten small­er. Now they were the size of salt and pep­per shak­ers. The radio sat on a table, not on the floor. Every week­day after­noon I sat beside that stur­dy Zenith lis­ten­ing to Tom Mix and Sky King.

On my 14th birth­day, in 1950, I was giv­en a radio of my own. A lit­tle Sears Sil­ver­tone. About the size of a recipe box. Inside were a half-dozen tubes the size of lip­sticks. Elec­tron­ic tubes were shrink­ing fast. But they still glowed red hot, so they need­ed space inside the box to keep from overheating.

By the time I went off to col­lege to study elec­tri­cal engi­neer­ing, the first gen­er­al-pur­pose com­put­ers were appear­ing in the mar­ket­place, each con­tain­ing hun­dreds or thou­sands of lip­stick-sized tubes in room-fill­ing box­es. The tubes act­ed like switch­es, direct­ing elec­tri­cal sig­nals this way and that. Some­times tubes burned out. We called it “down time” when the com­put­er did­n’t work. There was lots of down time.

A change of scale

Then, along came tran­sis­tors. Did the same thing as tubes, but cheap­er and more reli­ably. Did­n’t burn out. Did­n’t break. Because they worked at room tem­per­a­ture, lots of tran­sis­tors could be packed close togeth­er. And small. The size of a pin­head. The world of elec­tron­ics had changed scale. From meters to mil­lime­ters. The 60s and the 70s were the millidecades.

Now things moved fast. Engi­neers dis­cov­ered how to fit a dozen tran­sis­tors onto a piece of sil­i­con the size of a thumb­nail. Then a hun­dred. Then a thou­sand. Then a hun­dred thou­sand. Radio’s shrank to the size of wrist­watch­es and entire com­put­ers were squeezed onto chips of sil­i­con. Every machine could have its own lit­tle brain. Smart air­planes. Smart cars. Smart bombs.

Put a hun­dred thou­sand tran­sis­tors on a sil­i­con chip and each tran­sis­tor will have dimen­sions of mil­lionths of a meter, or microm­e­ters. Soon engi­neers began fab­ri­cat­ing motors, tweez­ers, and gears on the same micro scale. Micro­ma­chines. Micro­com­put­ers. Microtech­nol­o­gy. The 80s were the microdecade.

We are just get­ting used to the microdecade. Just get­ting used to hav­ing auto­mo­biles and wash­ing machines that are almost as smart as we are. Just get­ting used to rely­ing all day long on giz­mos that are too small to see.

Just get­ting used to micro when along comes nano.

Manipulating atoms

IBM sci­en­tists recent­ly announced the cre­ation of an elec­tron­ic switch that involves the back and forth motion of a sin­gle atom. Atoms are mea­sured in bil­lionths of a meter, called nanome­ters. At this scale the entire con­tents of the Library of Con­gress could be stored on a 12-inch disk. The com­plete works of Mozart — the entire clas­si­cal reper­toire! — could be stored on a CD. The…

Whoa, wait a minute, my head is spinning.

For the last cou­ple of years sci­en­tists have been learn­ing how to build struc­tures one atom at a time. Their tool is the scan­ning tun­nel­ing micro­scope, a device that can pick up atoms and move them around on a sur­face. Ear­li­er this year, for exam­ple, a Japan­ese sci­en­tist used a scan­ning tun­nel­ing micro­scope to etch Ein­stein’s face (the famous image of Ein­stein stick­ing out his tongue) onto a smooth sur­face. The pic­ture was mea­sured in bil­lionths of a meter. A nanoE­in­stein. A hun­dred mil­lion nanoE­in­steins could fit on the head of a pin.

Anoth­er Japan­ese research group etched “Peace 91” on a sur­face by blast­ing out atoms one by one. Sci­en­tists at IBM spelled out the com­pa­ny’s logo with 35 xenon atoms on a nick­el surface.

Sure, they were show­ing off, but these lit­tle tricks demon­strate what can be done. By the end of the cur­rent decade we may have nanoproces­sors, com­put­ers-on-a-chip that are a thou­sand times small­er and faster than any exist­ing today.

Some vision­ary sci­en­tists fore­see tiny smart robots on the nanome­ter scale, roam­ing around like vast invis­i­ble clouds of nanog­nats, build­ing hous­es atom by atom, decom­pos­ing trash, or clear­ing fat­ty deposits from the blood­stream. Impos­si­ble? Don’t bet on it. A virus is a nanoma­chine of sorts. If nature can build them, why can’t we?

Will nano be the ulti­mate in minia­tur­iza­tion? Does it make sense to talk about engi­neer­ing on a scale small­er than atoms? Tril­lionths of a meter are called picome­ters. Quadrillionths of a meter are called fem­tome­ters. Get­ting used to nano will take some time. Let’s hold off on pico and femto.