Invited Paper NS+MN-ThM3
Nanomanufacturing from Silicon to DNA

Thursday, October 22, 2015, 8:40 am, Room 212B

The production of integrated circuits using silicon fabrication technology is the dominant nanofabrication technology in the world today. However, the industry is maturing, and the technology used for integrated circuit manufacturing, although extraordinarily impressive, is suited, economically, only for that function. At the same time, the nanotechnology revolution has delivered an array of novel structures and materials with fascinating and useful properties, but has presented us with several challenges. These include scaling up production and reducing costs to levels that are commercially interesting, and finding ways of integrating heterogeneous nanostructures into fully functional systems. I will illuminate these issues with a brief description of the strengths and weaknesses of the semiconductor manufacturing paradigm, a comparison with the possibilities offered by DNA-mediated assembly, and an illustration of how a deep understanding of nanoscale physics can turn optical metamaterials from a laboratory curiosity into a manufacturable product.