For the last year, since the Nanotechnology Opportunity Report project began, I have been talking to engineers, investment bankers, technology-transfer officers, PR companies, venture capitalists, CEOs of major international businesses and, of course, the press. While it's easy to keep an eye on developments in nanotechnology via publications such as TNT Weekly, nanotechweb.org and Nanotechnology, there's no substitute for a week's total immersion in nanoscience.
So, in search of wine, octopus and nanoscience, I spent the whole of last week in Santiago de la Compostela, Spain, at TNT (Trends in Nanotechnology) 2002, Europe's largest multidisciplinary nanotechnology conference, along with more than 350 scientists from around the globe, with nary a venture capitalist nor investment banker in sight.
From Monday's opening lecture from Nobel laureate Leo Esaki, through 76 talks and almost 196 exhibited posters to Friday afternoon, there was a plethora of new and fascinating results.
Some, like those of James Heath and Stan Williams in molecular electronics, have already been reported in the popular press. Others, such as the analysis by Semiconductor Research Corporation's Jim Huchby of the roadmap for complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology - for decades the standard approach to making integrated circuits - threw up more questions than answers.
The important question raised was not whether we go to nanoelectronic devices, but how we achieve this without squandering billions of dollars on new fabrication facilities to move from the CMOS roadmap limit of around 9 nm to the quantum-limited nanoelectronics feature size of 2 nm. Do we replace CMOS with some direct nanotechnology-based substitute, such as carbon nanotube field-effect transistors (CNTFETs), or do we use the opportunity to create a whole new architecture based on intelligent function rather than bits? Given that power dissipation is a limiting factor on device size in many cases, and that CMOS is almost as efficient as you can get in this respect, the general feeling was that unconstrained research will throw up the answers. As Jim, an industry veteran, noted: "We are living in the most exciting times ever for information processing."
While nanoelectronics may have clear economic benefits, much of the conference was concerned with what scientists do best - understanding the minutiae of nanotechnology and attempting to make it reproducible. Whether this is theoretical calculations of processing speeds in quantum computers - they process more information as they get slower - or understanding how commonly used instruments such as atomic-force microscopes actually work, it forms the bedrock of knowledge on which nanotechnology will be built.
At 2 a.m. on Friday morning, after another fine conference dinner, a hooded figure emerged stirring a flaming bowl of Queimada, a Galician concoction of grappa, coffee and lemon peel, while muttering an incantation about owls and crows, toads and witches. It struck me then how most of the people I have been dealing with in the business community see the work of the scientists gathered that night - as magic.