Emerging Areas of Technology, Part 2, Number 3

(Nanowires)

Technological applications in the tech area of "Nanowires"

3. Nanowires: Few emerging technologies have offered as much promise as nanotechnology, touted as the means of keeping the decades-long electronics efforts to miniaturize in full develop and transfiguring disciplines from power production to medical diagnostics.

Several companies have invested in nanotech, and nearly every major university has declared nanotechnology research and development.

Wthin this R&D frenzy, are researchers who are learning to make the nanoscale wires that could be key elements in many working nanodevices.

As their name implies, nanowires are long, thin, and tiny; perhaps one-ten-thousandth the width of a human hair. Researchers can now manipulate the wires' diameters (from five to several hundred nanometers) and lengths (up to hundreds of micrometers).

Wires have been made out of such materials as the semiconductor silicon, chemically sensitive tin oxide, and light-emitting semiconductors like gallium nitride.

Difficult tasks remain, such as making electrical connections between the minuscule wires and the other components of any system.

Number 4, Bayesian Machine Learning is next.

You may return to the Index of Emerging Areas of Technology, Part 2.