Getting the dope on nanotechnology

Nanotechnology for Dummies, Richard Booker and Earl Boysen, Wiley (www.wiley.com), 2005. 361 pages. $16.

Rick Nelson, Chief Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 5/1/2006

You don't have to be a dummy to find Nanotechnology for Dummies useful. As with other Dummies offerings, this book offers an easy-to-take introduction to its topic, but it goes into sufficient depth that you'll undoubtedly learn something new even if you've investigated the topic before.

The book covers applications ranging from medicine to nanotech-based composites, including carbon buckyballs and nanotubes. There's also a chapter on investment opportunities. Yet, there's plenty directly applicable to EEs. The introductory portion touches on spectroscopy as well as atomic-force, scanning-electron, transmission-electron, scanning-tunneling, and magnetic-resonance-force microscopy—techniques you've probably encountered in a failure-analysis lab. The descriptions of these techniques, though brief, are clear and interesting.

The most applicable part for EEs might be the 100-plus pages on computation and energy. Once you skim past the definitions of megabits and gigabytes, you'll come to a compelling description of the migration from field-effect transistors to single-electron transistors, and an actual dummy who picks up this book is likely to become lost in the section that describes Coulomb blockades and single-electron tunneling. It's not surprising that this section is quite detailed, as coauthor Booker is described as a veteran engineer in the semiconductor industry.

Throughout the computation section, you'll learn about competing chip-fabrication techniques such as nano-imprint technology and the use of atomic-force microscopes to "write" nanotech structures onto chip substrates. You'll also learn about magnetic RAM (which needn't be clocked the way DRAM must be) and IBM's magnetic-tunnel-junction approach to MRAM compared with Naval Research Laboratory's vertical magnetoresistive RAM technique. The computation section also covers the manipulation of light using nano-designed crystals, the emergence of nano-optics for telecommunications applications, and the use of photoelectrochemical cells to produce hydrogen.

The book concludes with a compendium of organizations involved in nanotechnology research.