Most commercial nanoproducts are 10 to 15 years away because of difficulty and cost, the federal report says. Only a few are in practical use today, such as a device that reads data stored on a computer's hard disk. Samsung, a Korean firm, has built a prototype video screen from nanoscale parts. Richard Feynman, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, first predicted atomic-scale engineering 40 years ago. Calif. The computer industry is keenly interested.
Smaller sizes mean greater speed and storage capacity.
The smallest features on a current computer chip measure about 200 nanometers. Lucent Technologies is developing a 100-nanometer chip. Alton Clark, a researcher at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., uses a beam of electrons to write 20-nanometer patterns on a computer chip. Hewlett-Packard, the Palo Alto, Calif., computer maker, devotes half of its research budget to nanotechnology. One product is a wire only a dozen atoms thick.