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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kirk © who wrote (33317)	11/22/1999 5:25:00 PM
From: Doug B.	Respond to of 70976

The reason fabs cost several billion dollars is because the technology is _so_ specialized. Any technology that is better but even a little bit different might leave the chipmakers in the middle of a dry riverbed. I am a grad student in Computer Science, but I am working on DNA and Protein sequence analysis. Let me tell you, if biochemical engineering becomes a reality, and a viable computing technology comes out of it, it is not going to be AMAT or any other semconductor manufacturer that is going to reap the rewards. It will be some biotech company that can get biologists to think like engineers. Very few do. No semiconductor company will even begin to have a clue. JMNSHO. Regards, Doug For AMAT and LRCX... My thinking is they will be the ones to make "nanobots" that will be the little machines that might seek out cancer cells in our bodies or perhaps kill harmful bacteria in ponds. The question is crossover. Will nano-technology arrive soon enough before something like bio or quantum computers start cutting into silicon sales?

To: Kirk © who wrote (33317)	11/23/1999 10:02:00 AM
From: Katherine Derbyshire	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) are made with fairly standard silicon processing technology, but MEMS are way too big to be nanobots. Atomic force microscopes can assemble structures an atom at a time, but are very very slow. Too slow for mass production of nanobots, but maybe fast enough to build tools to make nanobots. My vote is for molecular computing as the Next Big Thing once silicon runs out of room (or as soon as molecular computing is cheaper, which may happen before we reach the technical limits of silicon), and for biotech as the source of nanobots. Drexler's 'Engines of Creation' is a popular science look at the possibilities. People with a technical background will throw it across the room halfway through, and may want to read his book "Nanosystems" instead. Both these books are a few years old at this point. Can anyone recommend a more recent treatment of nanotechnology? Katherine