Wotta Yotta Atoms
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As a complement to the 2004 MRS Spring Meeting, the Materials Research Society is pleased to introduce Research Tools Seminars. Held in the Exhibit Hall and free-of-charge to meeting attendees, these one-hour seminars will describe a technical approach to meet a particular challenge, as embodied in commercially-available products or tools.
Wednesday, April 14
10:30 am-11:30 am Polarimetric Camera for Real Time Trench Depth Monitoring and Phase Modulation Spectroscopic Ellipsometry for Materials Research Jobin Yvon Inc. • Edison, NJ TDM 200 Polarimetric Camera is a sensor for in situ trench depth measurement for MEMS applications. With its unique design, Phase Modulation Spectroscopic Ellipsometry has been a nondestructive metrology for measuring material properties and film thickness of ultra-thin-film with very high accuracy. 2:30 pm-3:30 pm Towards Nanomanufacture: The Development of Dip Pen Nanolithography NanoInk, Inc. • Chicago, IL DPN offers a direct-writing method to deposit structure on the nanoscale using soft and hard materials ranging from proteins to metals. The talk will review this process and show how using MEMS technology, it may be scaled up to benefit the researcher in time to result and the engineer to provide true bottom-up manufacturing capability on the nanometer length scale.
POSTERMINARIES
Wotta Yotta Atoms The prefix nano is everywhere. This is OK for today but, like Fleetwood Mac, I can’t stop thinking about tomorrow. I already have plans to leapfrog the nano generation and will ask my university to re-name my post “Professor of PicoEngineering” (or PPE for those who like classical educational allusions). But the next generation of materials practitioners is then in a real fix—the pico scale is already of subatomic dimensions, so where do we go from there? I suggest we learn from the example of the storage media folks and the astronomers: Big is Beautiful. Every generation (where a Moore’s Law generation is only a year and a half, of course) brings a doubling of something or other, so new prefixes come into usage fairly frequently. Most of us can remember kHz becoming MHz, smoothly eliding into GHz. We are reasonably happy with talk of teraherz or terabytes and occasionally an enthusiast blows us over with petabytes or exabytes. The visionaries are not content with a mere 1018 of anything, so they have coined a whole alphabet of new prefixes to cope with the next decade or so. Following exa (the power of 18) is an entire new series of extraordinary little modifiers which start with zeta (21) and then go backwards down the alphabet, continuing with yotta (24), xona (27), weka (30), and going on and on (and on). Until I discovered this fascinating list, I was planning to invent my own. I had planned to use egga (as in Schwarzenegga), wotta (as in wotta lotta) and plata (as in chips), but I realize that I am too late, and anyway I would have to change one of them to guvna. 216
Where does this leave the ambitious materials scientist, trying to make a mark in this competitive world? Clearl
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