Atomic-Level Manufacturing: Manufacturing With Every Atom in Its Proper Place May Be Coming Soon

[n2doc]

ScienceDaily (Oct. 24, 2010) — The long-held dream of creating atomically precise three-dimensional structures in a manufacturing environment is approaching reality, according to the top scientist at a company making tools aimed at that ambitious goal.

John Randall, Vice President of Zyvex Labs in Richardson, Tex., says his researchers have demonstrated a process that uses a scanning tunneling microscope tip to remove protective surface hydrogen atoms from silicon one at a time and then adds single atomic layers of silicon only to those meticulously cleared areas. Randall describes the achievement at the AVS 57th International Symposium & Exhibition, which takes place this week in the Albuquerque Convention Center in New Mexico.

To date, Zyvex Labs researchers have demonstrated removal of 50 hydrogen atoms per second. But with experience and innovation, Randall predicts large improvements in the speed of this limiting factor.
"There are many paths to scale-up, including parallelism," he says. "A thousand-fold increase in speed will be fairly easy to achieve."

Within seven years, Randall expects that Zyvex Labs will be selling initial production tools that can remove more than a million hydrogen atoms a second using 10 parallel tips at a cost of about $2,000 per cubic micrometer of added silicon (48 billion atoms)

more

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101019111527.htm

[meow mix]

1. earl grey hot

ty

[Posteritatis]

2. That'll be $(4.74 x 10^17), please. (nt)

[phantom power]

3. It's actually much more -- you pay extra for being able to specify the velocities

:rofl:

[Orsino]

6. It'll be outsourced to the Pakled...

...as Wal-Mart demands ever-lower prices.

[Odin2005]

4. The Luddites aren't gonna like this.

[Occulus]

5. One step closer to the nanofactory

shown here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqyZ9bFl_qg

[txlibdem]

7. The movement of atoms is fully automated?

It was a bit unclear but from reading the link in the OP but this must be a fully automated process, right?

If so... Yay!!!

[txlibdem]

8. Once this technology is more fully developed it will be a game changer

That will usher in the George Jetson era. When the "factory" is totally automated, the only employee needed will be someone to push the "start" button each morning and then just sit there watching the monitors to make sure all is working as it should.

The question then becomes: who will buy all the products that come out of that nano factory? Capitalism will become increasingly hard to maintain at that point. Why would we even have any need of money. Perhaps a fair and equitable society will evolve out of it all. Gasp!