Home > News > Nanotechnology is changing everything from medicine to self-healing buildings: Nanotechnology is so small it's measured in billionths of metres, and it is revolutionising every aspect of our lives
April 2nd, 2016
Abstract:
The past 70 years have seen the way we live and work transformed by two tiny inventions. The electronic transistor and the microchip are what make all modern electronics possible, and since their development in the 1940s they have been getting smaller. Today, one chip can contain as many as 5 billion transistors. If cars had followed the same development pathway, we would now be able to drive them at 300,000mph and they would cost just £3 each.
But to keep this progress going we need to be able to create circuits on the extremely small, nanometre scale. A nanometre (nm) is one billionth of a metre and so this kind of engineering involves manipulating individual atoms. We can do this, for example, by firing a beam of electrons at a material, or by vaporising it and depositing the resulting gaseous atoms layer by layer onto a base.
Source:
independent.co.uk
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