EXCLUSIVE TO KURZWEILAI.NET — I’m pleased to report that the Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems has finally been released. This marks the completion of the first broad, multidisciplinary effort to explore how current laboratory techniques for atomically precise fabrication can be extended, step by step, toward increasingly advanced products and capabilities.

The Roadmap project was led by the Battelle Memorial Institute, a not-for-profit corporation that manages a set of U.S. National Laboratories that includes Pacific Northwest, Oak Ridge, and Brookhaven. These labs hosted three of the Roadmap workshops and provided many of the participating scientists and engineers.

I served as lead technical consultant and had the privilege of joining forces with over 70 working group members drawn from academia, industry, and the national labs. Built around a series of workshops launched in 2005, the project has delivered a report totaling some 400 pages. It provides a picture of the state of the art in atomically precise fabrication and explores directions for both next-stage and longer-term research and applications. Links and more information about the Roadmap can be found here on my website.

Developments in the last 12 months show that the Roadmap is quite timely: As part of a study released last December, the U.S. National Research Council reviewed the technical analysis that I presented in Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation and called for experimental research in support of molecular manufacturing. Subsequently, DARPA issued a request for proposals for developing tip-based nanofabrication at the threshold of atomic precision, and the U.K. government announced grants to research teams developing nanomachines that can build materials molecule by molecule.

The Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems describes ways to move nanotechnologies forward in directions I have outlined in my technical publications. It centers on today’s capabilities, exploring the rewards we can expect from incremental advances, and links these advances to longer term objectives for atomically precise manufacturing (which, by the way, are quite unlike the popular fictions). Perhaps of greatest value, the Roadmap identifies broad criteria that can help researchers and research managers select high-payoff projects that can contribute to the emerging field of atomically precise nanosystems engineering. An area of special promise is integrating other nanotechnologies into complex, functional systems by exploiting recent breakthroughs in building self-assembling, atomically precise DNA structures.

I expect that the Roadmap will have a strong, cumulative impact on research agendas and strategic directions in the US and internationally. Its greatest impact may be in forward-looking Asian countries with an appetite for change.