We have, as a part of our research, been in contact with several researchers working in digital manufacturing field. This is what they had to say:
What would be the advantages and disadvantages of nanofabrication?
Advantages are of course that you can make products or devices very very small. As you know technology trends are for smaller and faster devices. Let's take the computer HDD(Hard-Disk Drive) for example, the density of memory storage per square inch has increased by 10,000,000 times since it's invention. Hard drives are getting smaller but the amount of storage is getting greater. Disadvantages come about in the fabrication process itself. When you are making products in the nanometer scale, you have to worry about many more disturbances. For example vibration from someone walking could move your setup by 20 nanometer and could destroy your fabrication. I'm actually not working on fabrication itself but on the controls part. My research is keeping this material within a nanometer during the whole fabrication process inspite of disturbances.
In what ways are you developing new techniques to make nanotechnology a reality in the commercial business place? What are your investment costs? (including people and time, as well as monetary investments)
I'm personally working in a NSF funded group called SINAM (scalable integrated nanomanufactuing). This is a collaboration between Stanford, UCB, UCSD, UCLA, UNCC and HP labs to bring put together nanomanufacturing research. For example, I'm in a CONTROLS group at UCLA and I work with a group that specializes in IMPRINT LITHOGRAPHY and a group from UNCC that specializes in METROLOGY. So we the controls group uses the sensors and actuators made by the metrology group to keep the imprint lithography process stable and fixed during fabrication.
-Shalom Dovber Ruben
Researcher at UCLA
More Interviews can be found under our Westec section.
Please describe your future vision of additive digital fabrication. Is nanofabrication included in this picture? Please explain why or why not. If it is, what time span are we talking about?
“Much of my vision is presented in the pages and documents at http://wohlersassociates.com. Microfabrication will be an important part of additive fabrication in the future. However, it will take years for commercial applications to develop.”
-Terry Wohlers
from Wohlers Associates
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