INGENIEUR
TECHNOLOGY
Five Ways Nanotechnology
Is Securing Your Future
By Dr Themis Prodromakis, University of Southampton
This article is reprinted with permission from
https://theconversation.com/five-ways-nanotechnology-is-securing-your-future-55254
T
he past 70 years have
seen the way we live and
work transformed by two
tiny inventions. The electronic
transistor and the microchip
are what make all modern
electronics possible, and since
their development in the 1940s
they’ve been getting smaller.
Today, one chip can contain as
many as five billion transistors.
If cars had followed the same
development pathway, we would
now be able to drive them at
300,000mph and they would
cost just £3 each.
But to keep this progress
going we need to be able
to create circuits on the
extremely small, nanometre
scale. A nanometre (nm) is one
billionth of a metre and so this
kind of engineering involves
manipulating individual atoms.
We can do this, for example, by
firing a beam of electrons at a
material, or by vaporising it and
depositing the resulting gaseous
atoms layer by layer onto a base.
The real challenge is using
such techniques reliably to
manufacture working nanoscale
devices. The physical properties
of matter, such as its melting
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point, electrical conductivity and
chemical reactivity, become very
different at the nanoscale, so
shrinking a device can affect its
performance. If we can master
this technology, however, then
we have the opportunity to
improve not just electronics but
all sorts of areas of modern life.
1. Doctors inside your
body
Wearable fitness technology
means we can monitor our
health by strapping gadgets
to ourselves. There are even
prototype electronic tattoos that
can sense our vital signs. But by
scaling down this technology, we
could go further by implanting
or injecting tiny sensors inside
our bodies. This would capture
much more detailed information
with less hassle to the patient,
enabling doctors to personalise
their treatment.
The possibilities are endless,
r ang ing from moni toring
inflammation and post-surgery
recover y to more exotic
applications whereby electronic
devices actually interfere with
our body’s signals for controlling
organ function. Although these