Abstract:
This article is about writing small. Inspired by R.P. Feynman's legendary talk There's plenty of room at the bottom, we recapitulate his famous Gedanken experiment of condensing a lot of useful information on the head of a pin [see Feymnan R, J. MEMS 1 (1992) 60]. These considerations will familiarize LIS with the length scales for a future downsizing of technological components, and they allow for some speculations about ultimate physical or chemical limits of the corresponding nanodevices. Furthermore we will analyze the nano-technological capabilities of Mother Nature in the case of magnetotactic bacteria, and briefly sketch the cornerstones of the rapidly growing field of biomineralization, which might open up a new science of complex functional nanomaterials in the near future. Finally we describe a general scheme to shrink integrated microelectronic circuits towards the very size limits of nanotechnology