Nano technology is the new thing with semiconductors. With nano-mechanical parts, motors, gears, valves, sensors, relays etc - well the future might not involve making what we have smaller, but maybe optimizing everything else to be smaller.
For decades people have made processors smaller and smaller, but then look at your PC power supply, why does that have to be a shoe box and the processor have to be an after-8 mint?
Imagine a high power relay, or amplifier on a microprocessor - it's a case of doing more with what we have, not making it very much smaller.
There's a finite limit to what we can do realistically with quality - the smaller the chips go, the more likely they are to fail, or rather be mis-processed and eventually give up. Going smaller has limited benefits, but expanding on what technology can be processed onto the chip is all win. We might see the end of big, bulky, hot, and expensive power supplies. We might see nano-hard drives, writing data directly onto diffused silicon. We might see tiny blenders, working their way through our blood, eating up cholesterol. We might see automatic insulin dispensers implanted into Diabetics stomachs, which pump insulin automatically depending on the demands of your system
There are implications all over the place, don't think for one second that things have slowed down
. The company I work for has Britain's only, nano-technology (MEMS) wafer fab - at least I think that's still the case. Some of the ideas are incredible, there are still a lot of really inventive people in this country - especially in the physics-heavy universities in England.
