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Nanoscale Fabrication

Our processes of fabricating materials have remained static over recent decades. Despite bold predictions from 1980s nanotechnology theorists that revolutionary changes were imminent, many traditional fabrication methods persist. What can we do to unlock new capabilities?

R&D Gaps (3)

Synthetic Biology Platforms Are Over-Reliant on Evolved Cells That We Don’t Fully Understand or Control

Nanoscale Fabrication
We currently perform synthetic biology using naturally evolved (“kludgy”) cells rather than truly bottom-up engineered cells. This bottleneck limits our ability to design fully customizable biological systems.
Nanoscale Fabrication
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Inability to Perform Chemistry with Direct Positional Control

Nanoscale Fabrication
Our current methods do not allow precise control over the positional placement of atoms or groups during chemical synthesis, limiting our ability to build molecules with atomic precision. A general-purpose approach to atomically precise fabrication was envisioned by Drexler in the 1980s and Feynman ...
Nanoscale Fabrication
36

Current Chip Fabrication Methods are Extremely Expensive and Hard to Change

Nanoscale Fabrication
Modern chip fabs are enormous, multi-billion-dollar facilities with limited versatility in what they can produce. This bottleneck restricts the ability to create assemblies with diverse molecular components on a small scale.
Nanoscale Fabrication
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