The trend to miniaturisation within technology leads to a need for increasing precision at scales less than one millionth of a metre. The term nano-technology covers this trend over a wide range of fields. The manufacture of semiconductor devices involves nano-technology. Foresight technology assessments have identified nano-technology as the critical factor underpinning a wide range of future growth markets such as in medicine and ecology. Computerised robotic machines at atomic scales could conceivably be put to almost any use and build bio-chip computers of outstanding capabilities.
Engineers can already manipulate atoms or molecules into ordered patterns despite nature's efforts.
However, there remains an enormous gap between such ordered patterns and any working nano-machines. They occur only in natural organic systems at present. Unlike an electronic-book it has paper pages.