1 P-4-1 INVESTING IN NANOTECHNOLOGY

Christie R.K. Marrian Microsystems Technology Office, DARPA

3 70 1 Fairfax Drive Arlington, VA

Nanotechnology is currently the focus of much investment in the USA and worldwide. In the USA the federal government has an initiated a broad, and ambitious, program entitled the National Nanotechnology Initiative ("I)'. It is important to realize that the N N I involves almost all the various US government agencies that are involved in sponsoring basic research and development. Thus the NNI can be viewed as an umbrella under for funding research at the forefront of fields across the hard and soft sciences. It should also be noted that the significant budgets now being dedicated to the NNI are not all 'new' money. In many cases they represent a redirection of existing budget lines. In addition to this federal program, there are a number of equally ambitious state based programs sponsoring Nanotechnology. The California investment is perhaps the most visible and includes the creation of the California Nanosystems Institute. Other states have adopted a similar strategy of leveraging their own investment by attracting federal and private funding. A significant fraction of these state investments is going into bricks and mortar and can perhaps best be viewed as a way to boost investment in the infrastructure of university based research.

The variety of the technical research directions that fall under the Nanotechnology umbrella is vast. It is sometimes difficult to make sense of all this! Nanoelectronics, for example, is seen as a potential 'solution' to the problems of continued scaling of silicon based CMOS devices. However, variations of the conventional MOSFET have been shown to scale to dimensions close to 10 nm. Thus, the real issue with continued scaling is not so much technical as economic. Thus alternative strategies for extensions of microelectronics really have to provide manufacturing level benefits as opposed to just the advantages increased fhctionality through miniaturization. For example, molecular electronics devices have been shown to have interesting switching characteristics but many, many challenges remain before they will appear in circuits that will outperform their silicon-based equivalents. Nonetheless, there still may be opportunities for molecular electronics based on the economic (as opposed to purely scaling) argument.

Ultimately, it is believed that the current US investment in Nanotechnology will be beneficial to the economic prosperity of the USA. Interestingly, venture capital firms are investing in Nanotechnology start-ups. This comes at a time when venture capital financing has dropped dramatically from the last few years. No doubt, the range of products and applications will be as diverse as the current Nanotechnology investment.

' wvw.nano.gov describes the NNI and many related initiatives.

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