With just about everyone avidly following nanotechnology, “nanowords”—such as nanomanufacturing, nanofabrication, nanocleaning, nanotopography, nanotubes, and even nanobuckyballs (60 carbon atoms bound together in the form of a soccer ball)—are becoming part of everyday conversation.

The National Nanotechnology Initiative (www.nano.gov) defines the nano-world as anything under 100 nm (1 nm = 10-9 meters), describing it as “…the ability to work at the molecular level, atom by atom, to create large structures with fundamentally new organization.”

This anything-but-nano frenzy could give contamination control professionals nightmares. Do we need to worry now? And just how far off is nanomanufacturing?

After talking to experts, I have come to the conclusion that the answer to the first question is No; and the answer to the second question is, “It depends on what ‘is’ is.” (Sorry, Bill.) In some sense, we’re already there: semiconductor fabs, driven by Moore’s law, are talking nano-language with lithography technology at the sub-100 nm level in order to prepare for the production of chips with plummeting feature sizes. The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS 2001) has issued lithography requirements including a plethora of nanometer issues.

But if we are talking about actual nanofabrication—that is, construction of functional devices such as nanogears—we are far away. The reason we’re not there yet is that nanomanufacturing intrinsically presents some difficult problems. Consider nanomachining for smoothness, termed by some as a nano “top-down” (as opposed to “bottom-up” synthesis of individual molecules) process. Dr. Ioan D. Marinescu, professor and director of the University of Toledo’s Precision Micro-Machining Center, is involved in nanopolishing of magnetic heads where he is working with 2 Å roughness levels, using a diamond powder with a granularity of 0.125 microns.

As for nanofabrication, the bottom-up activity, we are a long way off. The progress of nanomanufacturing will depend heavily on instrumentation. Professor Marinescu speaks, for instance, of the development of a special scanning electron microscope in Japan, which can manipulate nanoparticles inside a vacuum chamber. The instrumentation and the metrology must precede the nanomanufacturing.

But what about contamination control? Mark Jamieson is national director of advanced technology business at HDR Inc. This architectural and engineering firm has a science and technology group that works on setting up nanolaboratories. He explains that in terms of cleanrooms and particle counting, the laboratories are only Class 10, Class 100, or even higher. The places where contamination becomes critical, he reports, are in temperature and humidity control, vibration, and ESD interference. Vibration control levels are in the 25 microinch/sec range, with temperature controls ±0.01 °C.

Considering that nanotechnology brings together a number of complex disciplines—biotechnology, scanning electron microscope development, metrology, chemical and gas technology, and contamination control in its broadest sense—we are in for some very interesting nanotimes, which A2C2 will watch closely.