Advanced manufacturing

Nanotechnology and the tendency to miniaturization in the manufacturing industry are familiar to most people employed in the microelectronics and computer industry. Nevertheless, nanotechnology has already been introduced into other scientific and technological areas as well, like robotics, biology and medicine, fiber optic communication networks, aerospace technology, advanced materials technology, chemical engineering and precision manufacturing. Two interlinked trends are involved, the trend towards miniaturization and the trend towards ultraprecision processing. Ultraprecision processes are already extensively applied in manufacturing industry, for example, in manufacturing of car and aircraft engines by improving their performance and in manufacturing of optical parts, such as lenses and mirrors, by obtaining high quality surfaces, replacing, therefore, “traditional” manufacturing methods. On the order hand, in order to observe and measure at the nanometer scale, new instruments and measuring techniques, that provide this ability, are developed. By employing principles of physics, various new methods are used, such as atomic force microscopy, laser position measurement and tunneling electron microscopy. These techniques also allow for manipulating objects on the atomic scale and putting an atom or a molecule on a designated location.
The original idea for the development of nanotechnology comes from the area of microelectronics and its applications in computer systems. According to this manufacturing concept, the smaller the particles are, the reduced is their manufacturing cost and the higher is their productivity. This has already been achieved in the chips industry as it can be seen by comparing the size and the speeds of computers of the 1980s and today. Nanotechnology is made possible through technological advances made in several disciplines, where the commercial opportunities, arisen from engineering research in this field, are usefully classified.
As already mentioned, the two main trends in the miniaturization of products are the ultraprecision and the nanotechnology processing. By ultraprecision processing, defined are these processes by which the highest possible dimensional accuracy has been achieved at a given time. It is carried out by machine tools with very high accuracy. Nanotechnology is defined as the fabrication of devices with atomic or molecular scale precision, but it also includes all devices with size less than 100 nm. It is perhaps today's most advanced manufacturing technology and is usually called “extreme technology” or “bottom-up” manufacturing because it reaches the theoretical limit of accuracy in machining, which is the size of an atom or molecule of a substance.