One does not have to look very far. In biology, the manufacturing of proteins, for example, occurs by expressing the DNA code into a precise assembly of amino acids through a series of enzymatic reactions. Growth of inorganic crystals on certain facets and patterns is also a form of coded assembly of atoms, although perhaps not as precise as biology. Production requires one to direct the coded self-assembly of nanostructures using optical lithography and thus form a hybrid manufacturing technique. Many novel techniques have been developed for this purpose, but there is none that can be called a technology yet.
Much work remains to be done.
Let us explore this through a few examples. The magnitude of societal energy consumption suggests that even marginal improvements in efficiency and conversion methods can have an enormous impact on the economy, energy reserves, and the environment. It was recently shown by Mildred S. Dresselhaus and her group at MIT that if thermoelectric materials such as alloys of bismuth are nanostructured, quantum confinement of electrons and phonons allow tailoring of their thermal, electrical, and thermoelectric properties in a way that their thermoelectric figure of merit can be dramatically increased. This means that one then would be able to design and build solid-state energy conversion devices with better performance than internal combustion engines and vapor compression refrigerators. Although electron transport in these confined nano-structures is relatively well understood, understanding of heat transport has remained a bottleneck.