CIOInsider India Magazine

For years, computer scientists and physicists have been postulating that nanotechnology would completely reshape our lives and unleash a wave of inventions that will save humanity. Things aren’t happening as they expected, but quietly, the nanotech revolution is proceeding. Scientists are using nanotechnology in manufacturing microchips, a variety of miniatures, from ultra-microscopic machines to new types of lenses from last decade. The nanoscale gizmos are so integrated into the structure of our lives and the devices in our pockets that we miss the fact that they are a real example of the nanotechnology revolution promised in the last few years.

Everyday items which are unified with nanotechnology are airbags, cell phones, radars, inkjet printers, home projectors, 5G and other high-speed wireless technologies. Nanotechnology has the potential to enable a dizzying array of micro cameras and other types of sensors that can detect everything from air pollution and black ice to hacking attempts and skin cancer. It is still immobile from the more unusual past predictions about the future of nanotechnology which stimulates endless copies until molecular-sized robots patrol the bloodstream and repair damage.

Nanotechnology in Microchips
Today, creating real-life nanomachines means capitalizing on the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in perfecting the manufacture of microchips since 1959. Chip companies rush to make faster, more power-efficient chips leading to the development of complicated and expensive equipment. By using the same types of machines, techniques and ‘fabs’ as microchip, factories, known builders of nanomachines, can use the steady progress of Moore’s Law to make their devices ever smaller.

“ASML, the world’s leading manufacturer of microchip-manufacturing equipment, researches and manufactures equipment with its major customers, Intel, Samsung, and TSMC in mind,” says Peter Wennink, President and Chief Executive Officer, Dutch national. However, there has always been a department that works with clients who want to make something other than traditional microchips and design them into a technology that can be customized to suit their needs.

The process includes microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) representing a classic example of tiny machines made with chip fabrication equipment. MEMS have gotten radically smaller over the decades. Take your smartphone for instance, to transmit and receive different radio frequencies required for it to talk to cell phone towers or connect to your Wi-Fi or wireless earbuds, it must filter out all the stray interference that, more than ever, affects those bands of spectrum.

“So, it uses tiny radio filters without which none of our wireless devices could function. Where microchips and radio antennae are static, entirely solid-state devices, the radio filters they depend on actually move. They vibrate at the same frequency as the signal to be received or transmitted, or sometimes at the frequency to be filtered out, like a cluster of tiny tuning forks,” says George Holmes, CEO, Resonant.

The system is built in such a way that when the phone is deskbound on your desk, streaming music to your earbuds, there are dozens of little elements inside, most shaped like tiny combs, vibrating billions of times a second. They work precisely because they are tiny. Only something so small existing on a scale with bonds between atoms being much stronger, relative to an object’s size, could vibrate at these frequencies and not shake itself to bits.

Cellphones and Nanotechnology
“Similarly, for the ground-sensing radar in planes to work properly, it has to filter out interference from, among other things, America’s rapidly proliferating 5G cell phone networks. The problem, is that radars in older planes were designed and built before anyone knew 5G networks would be a thing. Fixing this problem could be expensive, as it could mean replacing or updating some of those old radars. The fear of airlines and the FAA is, in essence, that for the lack of sufficient microscopic combs vibrating at a few hundreds of millions or billions of times a second in order to tune out a nearby cell phone tower, a plane could be lost,” says Holmes.

Cell phones also contain many other MEMS. The system allows to know the orientation, as well as the magnitude and direction of their acceleration, which is no bigger than a grain of rice today. When it was first invented and installed in the Apollo spacecraft, it was bigger than a basketball. Similar and equally tiny sensors signal air bags when to deploy. The system of rapidly-twitching, red blood cell-size mirrors that make home projectors possible are also by MEMS.

“An example of modern nanomachines manipulates light rather than electricity. A new kind of lens, called ‘metalens,’ has been shown in the laboratory to be able to bend and shape light in ways that used to require a whole stack of conventional lenses. The advantage of metalenses is that they are thin and nearly flat-at least to the naked eye,” says Juejun Hu, associate professor of materials science, MIT.

Under an electron microscope, the surface of a metalens looks like a plush carpet. At this scale, the metalens is clearly covered with minuscule pillars, each one-thousandth the width of a human hair by sticking up from its surface. This texture allows a metalens to bend light in a way that’s analogous to the way that conventional lenses do.

Nanotechnology in 3-D Sensing
Start-ups are translating metalens technology to commercial applications. Among them is Metalenz, which just announced a deal with STMicroelectronics. This application of metalenses allows a greater variety of phone manufacturers to achieve the kind of 3-D sensing that enables Apple’s Face ID technology.

Robert Devlin, CEO, Metalenz says, “unlocking the phone with your face is just the beginning. Metalenses also have abilities that can be difficult to reproduce with conventional lenses. For example, because they facilitate the detection of polarized light, they can ‘see’ things conventional lenses can’t. That could include detecting levels of light pollution, allowing the cameras on automobile safety and self-driving systems to detect black ice, and giving our phone cameras the ability to detect skin cancer.”

“Shrinking nanomachines further and getting to the theoretical limit of tininess—the point at which humans are manipulating individual atoms—will require technologies radically different than the ones we currently use to manufacture even the most advanced microchips,” says Dr. Andrei Fedorov, professor, Georgia Institute of Technology.