2. Introduction• The term “nanotechnology” was coined by Nomo
Taniguchi in 1974 in relation to the manufacture of
items by mechanical machining methods. He showed
how the drive for manufacturing with higher precision
was inexorably leading to the point where, by the year
2000, parts manufactured by “normal” machining
would be made to 1-µm accuracy, while “precision”
machining would be achieving an accuracy of 10 nm,
and “ultra-precision” machining would be reaching
down to 1-nm accuracies. His predictions were largely
correct. This type of nanotechnology forms part of a
group often referred to as “top-down”
nanotechnologies, which approach the required
tolerance in an evolutionary way, frequently by
refinements of existing fabrication methods .
3. In 1964 Gordon Moore of Fairchild
Semiconductor Corporation in the United States
predicted that the number of transistors that
could be fabricated on a chip would double every
year. “Moore’s law” still roughly holds, except
that the rate of increase is a doubling about every
two to three years. Current world state of the art
in chips that are commercially available, such as
the Intel Pentium, is a minimum feature size of
about 300 nm with about 1.5 million transistors
on a chip. Specialized devices such as dynamic
random access memory (DRAM) chips, which can
store up to 64 million bits of information, have
over 64 million transistors on them. Early in the
first decade of the 21st century the minimum
feature sizes on commercial chips should
decrease to between 100 and 200 nm for
components such as DRAM chips that can store
Invention
4. The ability to control manufacturing precision to these
levels is bringing many, sometimes unexpected, benefits
other than simply the ability to produce an article with a
very well defined shape. For example, it has been shown
that materials normally considered to be brittle will
machine in a ductile fashion if the cut is controlled to be
less than a certain critical depth (typically in the sub-
micro meter range). This means that material is removed
in the form of plastically deformed sward rather than
chips, avoiding the formation of extensive cracking and
damage beneath the machined surface. This can be
achieved using the machines developed for ultra-
precision machining.
Function Of Nanotechnology
5. Usually uses of
nanotechnology
• Typically, the process is applied in grinding, where the tool
(typically made from particles of diamond or cubic boron
nitride embedded in a carrier medium) is rotating at very
high speeds—usually tens of thousands of revolutions per
minute. With such techniques the material can be
removed at an economical rate. Such “ductile-mode”
machining of brittle materials is providing major benefits in
terms of improved surface finish, reduced sub-surface
damage, and consequent improved component lifetimes.
Examples of areas where this is being applied include the
grinding of the edges of silicon wafers for integrated
circuits, the shaping of glass-ceramic discs for use as the
substrates in computer hard-disk drives, and the grinding
of hard materials such as camshafts for car engines
6. Nanophase
been known since Roman times that a glass
with a deep ruby-red color can be made by
dispersing ultra-fine particles of gold in it.
These particles have a size of about 100 nm.
Scientists are now studying the optical
properties of a wide range of materials,
particularly semiconductors, in ultra-fine
powder form. It has been found that it is
possible to alter the absorption spectrum of
materials very markedly according to their
size. The wavelength at which most of the
energy is absorbed can be shifted, in some
cases, such as titania or zinc oxide, into the
ultraviolet; in other cases, such as cadmium
selenide, the material’s color is changed.