According to the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, “nanotechnology is the engineering of functional systems at the molecular scale”. The idea is that we should soon be able to manipulate individual atoms and molecules to construct devices that are more powerful, more precise, lighter and stronger. These days, the term “nanotechnology” has become much more popular and is often used to describe any type of manufacturing or research that takes place at dimensions less than 1000 nanometres. There are three main aims of devices manufactured using nanotechnology. Firstly, we should be able to place every atom in exactly the right place. Second, we should be able to build anything that complies with the laws of physics, as long as we can understand it at a molecular or atomic level. Finally, and perhaps the one that drives most research in this field, is the idea that the costs of manufacture should not be much higher than the costs of only the materials and energy required to put the product together. There are two important concepts related to nanotechnology that are necessary if we are going to achieve the three aims mentioned above. The first is known as “positional assembly”, which is how we would get all of the molecules or atoms in the right place. This can be achieved through the use of tiny robots, molecular in size and produced using nanotechnology themselves. The second concept is “massive parallelism”, which is a way to reduce the costs of manufacturing. Because one molecule-sized robot is going to take a very long time to build anything of substantial size, the idea is to have many robots that work in a production line, getting larger at each stage until the process is completed. Nanotechnology is an exciting field of research that is expected to see a huge amount of growth in coming years.

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