One very specialized area of industrial technology at the moment concerns the achievement of almost unimaginable precision of positioning in order within huge setups. For example semiconductor manufacturing, which could be considered as the representative of nano-sized technology of the present day, requires precision in positioning wafers that goes way beyond micrometers, but the manufacturing devices involved are enormous, often measuring several meters, and to meet the burgeoning demand, we need whole banks of them, all producing absolutely exact replicas. Another example is dot matrix displays — the SEDs, LCDs and plasma displays that are rapidly replacing CRTs now. They contain anything from hundreds of thousands to millions of elements that need to all work together systematically and with great precision. And the bigger the screen and the greater the definition, the number of elements increases exponentially, with the difficulty in manufacturing to the required level increasing even more drastically.

We're likely to see even more emphasis on this direction of ensuring greater precision as nanotechnology advances. This is one of the most important of the changes that nanotech is bringing to today's industrial technology. However, for nanotechnology to effect such changes...or let me put it this way — if nanotech is to become really significant as an industry, we need to develop the technology to manufacture things at low enough cost to generate a profit. At the current level, nanotech still works out too expensive.

That's not the only thing, though. No matter how far nanotech develops, we humans are the ones using it, and so we need human-sized interfaces for enabling us to use it. And to be really practical, nanotech also needs to be able to work with the tools and machinery that we've been using up to now, not only at the development stage, but even when it is sufficiently advanced too. This matching of nanotech with human-sized technology and existing systems is a very big challenge. These two themes — making nanotech low-cost, and integrating it with existing systems to create new capabilities — are both very important research themes that we're working on.