Living in the materials world
By Bill Schweber, Executive Editor -- EDN, January 22, 2004
Engineers understand the importance of basic materials to our industry and its progress. Advances in the performance and reliability of our ICs, connectors, pc boards, and passives depend on increasingly pure and perfect materials, which ironically, precise impurities often moderate. This situation applies not just to silicon. Even the relatively humble resistor or capacitor depends on the quality and consistency of, as well as improvements in, so many members of the periodic table. (Reference 1 provides a fascinating and readable exploration of the role of every element in our modern society.)
The critical but sometimes assumed part that materials play in our technology became clear to me when I attended the recent annual meeting of the Materials Research Society (www.mrs.org). Among the 5000 attendees and several hundred exhibitors were many small companies providing both the materials themselves and the infrastructure necessary to pursue them, such as high-temperature furnaces, cryogenic chambers, intense magnetic- field sources, and modeling software. Although most of the exhibitors were small, they fill critical roles by providing building-block functions for the larger, more complex technological pyramid that, metaphorically speaking, other practitioners in research and industry are building.
But I also saw evidence of a disruptive wave hitting the materials world and, by extension, our world. In a word, it's nanomaterials. Rather than working with bulk substances and making them better, the nanomaterials-driven world starts with individual atoms and molecules and builds upward. Think of Legos, except the pieces are basic atomic units, and you'll have an idea of what is going on in the materials world.
Nanomaterials bring new problems that we, as scientists and engineers, are unaccustomed to and barely know how to handle. How do you measure the mechanical, physical, optical, thermal, or electrical properties of materials that barely exist, for example, or are only a few atomic layers thick? Can you apply to them the well-understood rules about mechanical hardness? How do you model them, when quantum and microscopic-level, rather than macro-level, forces play a major role in their reality?
From what I've seen, great progress has occurred in both developing and understanding the new materials that nanotechnology promises and, in some cases, already provides. I had one worrisome thought in the back of my mind: The history of technology shows that major disruptions in the smoothly forecasted and extrapolated march of progress always occur. In our industry, we know that the vacuum tube yielded to the transistor, which in turn was overtaken by the IC. At each of these disruptive junctions, the established major players made efforts to stay in the game; these efforts ranged from serious and early commitments to "too-little, too-late" efforts at catching up. Yet, almost without exception, these attempts to stay viable failed, and new companies that didn't exist a few years before became the leaders in the next wave.
Is the same fate in store for us? What happens if a disruptive technology that is just getting started in some graduate student's lab renders obsolete silicon-based ICs as we know them and all that they represent and imply to us? Will we have self-assembling, self-replicating, self-learning, and self-healing systems based on biological nanomaterial elements? Will our billion-dollar fabrication facilities become empty monuments to disruptive technologies?
Hang on; it's going to be a wild ride, and no one knows where it is going.
Contact me at bschweber@edn.com.
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