Future of Engineering

A University of Texas at Dallas team will play a key role in a new $15 million research project designed to enable manufacturing at an almost unimaginably small scale: one atom at a time. This breakthrough technology will make it possible to manufacture devices with atomic precision by exploiting our established ability to remove individual hydrogen atoms from a silicon surface using a scanning tunneling microscope.

Known as atomically precise manufacturing, the technique is expected to enable a wide variety of devices and products, including:

* Ultra-low-power semiconductors for cellphones and other wireless communications
* Sensors with ultra-high sensitivity
* Data encryption orders of magnitude more secure than existing technology
* Optical elements that enable unprecedented performance in computing and communications
* Customized surfaces
* Nanoscale genomics arrays that would enable a person’s complete genetic sequence to be read in less than two hours

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Labels: Manufacturing-Production-Engineering, Material-Sciences