Business Week has been going to town on nanotechnology. We leafed through it on a flight from Vienna to Madrid, but there is little really new in the article, and the sight of the northern face of the Alps from Austria to France was a welcome distraction from the promise of more golf balls and car bumpers.
One exchange in particular made us chuckle.
“There are more molecules in a drop of water than in all the transistors ever built” Steve Jurvetson, venture capitalist.
“I could spit on this table, and you’d have even more molecules, but what’s it worth?” – Randy Goodall, associate director of Sematech International.
Weve said it before, well say it again in Singapore next month and well continue saying it for the next ten years at least you can make things smaller, but that doesnt always make them better. Silicon CMOS works extremely well so far, and its limitations are a not problem for most applications (does Internet browsing really need a 3.4GHz processor?), and it will be around and doing the grunt work for a long time to come.
Thats not to belittle the attempts of companies across the whole ICT spectrum working on everything from memory to displays, but while plastics have been around for fifty years, we still use plenty of wood. The reason is the same as for CMOS, its cheap, and it works. Further out, we will see genuinely disruptive technologies, but many of these will have to learn to live alongside CMOS for the time being.