1. How Small Can You Get?
A human hair is about 100 microns (micrometers) wide
One micron is about times the thickness of a dime
Current microchip transistors are about two microns wide
The wires that connect the transistors are less than a micron wide
If vacuum tubes were used in place of the transistors on a microchip the chip would be the size of a city block!

2. Micromachines (MEMS) Current applications
inertial sensors (e.g., in air bags)
medical devices
memory and mass storage
micro-mirrors for digital projection (DLP)

3. A “Nano” Guitar!

4. Population Densities 55 million transistors per chip
10 billion components / wafer
6 billion people / world

5. The Shrinking Transistor

6. How Can We See Small Things?
Atomic Force Microscopy
cadmium selenide
silicon

7. Refrigerator Magnet Imaging
sample
pull probe strip
probe
pull probe strip

8. What is the best representation?
(c)

9. Imaging Atoms
Scanning-Tunneling Electron Microscopy (STEM) image shows individual platinum atoms (bright blobs) on an alumina support, with Pt3 clusters circled.
STEM image of a silicon crystal in the [112] orientation reveals pairs of atom columns in which the intrapair separation is 0.78 Å.

10. Joseph Stroscio; Robert Celotta / NIST
Manipulating Atoms
A single cobalt atom
Joseph Stroscio; Robert Celotta / NIST
A 40-nanometer-wide NIST logo made with cobalt atoms on a copper surface. The ripples in the background are made by electrons, which create a fluid-like layer at the copper surface. Each atom on the surface acts like a pebble dropped in a pond.

11. Forms of Carbon (Allotropes)
diamond
graphite
“buckytube”
“buckyball”
~0.70 nm

12. Single-walled nanotube (SWNT)
Growing Nanotubes
Forest of nanotubes
Single-walled nanotube (SWNT)