Drivers for nanotechnologies in Europe

Drivers for nanotechnology, drivers for innovation, drivers for economic growth. Many people say that the key to anticipating future growth is to first understand the underlying motivation for current trends today. According to this belief, by drawing a line from the past to the present, we are able to predict the future by extrapolation. The now infamous Moore´s law is an example of this endless march down the road of technology development. For many years now scientists have been predicting that modern IC production technology has finally reached a limit, some sort of brick wall beyond which Moore´s law can no longer hold true. But, keeping in-line with Moore´s law, entering the nano-era requires an increasingly significant effort in research and development. The emergence of bottom-up approach to fabrication of structures requires the integration of competencies from many different fields of expertise. Assembling devices one molecule at a time using molecular building blocks requires a skill set not typically found in a traditional semiconductor environment. The new breakthrough technologies will likely result from the integration of applied microelectronics background with more fundamental inputs. And for this, Europe again has specific strengths due to the synergy between national and European level initiatives.