Nanotechnology: the ultimate destination that mankind can reach This article was contributed by Jyung Tae-hyoung, executive director, Future Technology Research Division, ETRI. During the past decades, we have witnessed dramatic changes in our everyday lifestyles, resulting from the unprecedented information technology (IT) revolution: an overlapping of the computer-communication revolution. Continuing development of the mobile phone is taking place right now into an allin- one, portable, hand-held phone with universal utility including voice, camera, Internet, entertainment, credit card, and television applications. Computing is a key element in this revolution where the main driving force has been semiconductor technology integrating more devices within a given area by miniaturizing devices. The first computer built with a transistor was Tradic in 1955, and it had only 800 transistors. The Pentium chip released in 2004 has 125,000,000 transistors in about 1 cm2 area, where the size of transistors is downscaled to 50 nm. Within the next few years, an experimental chip will be built with one billion transistors. In the next 15 to 20 years there will be a continuous miniaturizing trend, and we will see a chip with one trillion transistors with the computing power of the chip amounting to 100 MIPS (million instructions per second) which, according to Professor Hans Moravec at Robotics Institute of Carnegie-Mellon University, could do the job of the human brain's 100 billion neurons. In other words, we are going to witness robots with human intelligence by 2020, where the main processing chip is composed of transistors of a few nanometers. Nanotechnology (NT) incorporates a wide range of techniques and tools to artificially fabricate or control nano-sized objects, i.e., a molecular or even atomic scale, where semiconductor technology is merely one of them, as previously exemplified with silicon chips. Since all the materials are composed of atoms (about 0.1 nm in size), nanotechnology is the ultimate destination that mankind can reach, having a huge impact on almost all industries and all areas of society in the future world when nanotechnology is combined with other techonologies such as information-, bio-, and cognitive-technologies. It is well-known that the phenomena of the nano-world are ruled by the laws of quantum mechanics. So they are quite different to those of the macroscopic world that we are accustomed to and the proper engineering of the nano-world can open wide opportunities for creating solutions to cope with many global problems: population, energy, environment. It offers smaller, faster, more capable, smarter, better built, longer lasting, cleaner, and safer products for the home, for communications, medicine, transportation, agriculture, and industry in general. Imagine a data storage device no larger than a thumbnail that contains the entire contents of the Library of Congress. Or a house of no lamps but just wallpaper that illuminates. Or a material much lighter but ten-fold stronger than steel. In this era of an overlapping of the computer-communications revolutions, the Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) has made significant efforts to build national IT infrastructures and, as a result, the IT industry has emerged as a key driving force of the Korean economy. In order to cope with the challenge and make a leap toward becoming a global leader in the IT field, MIC formulated the IT839 strategy (introducing eight services, promoting three infrastructures, and fostering nine growth engines) to help IT Korea stay ahead. In full recognition of the importance of nanotechnology as the IT growth engine of the future, MIC has also devoted considerable efforts into developing the ITNT core technologies along with building IT-NT infrastructures comprising facilities and human resources. Significant research achievements in the field of silicon nanotechnology include the fabrication of 8nm triple-gate MOSFETs (metal-oxidesemiconductor field effect transistors), and the core technology development of the Schottky transistor as a future nanoelectronic device for sub-10nm electronics, and the light emitting diode made of silicon nano-crystals: lighting sands. Recently, the importance of converging technology based on nanotechnology is being emphasized worldwide. Considering the sizes of biology objects such as proteins, viruses, DNA etc. that are on a nanometer-scale and the possible huge impact of the bio-contents, it is understandable to that a lot of attention is being paid to the fusion of nano-bioinformation technologies: boosting biotechnology by utilizing the powerful tools of matured information technology with the aid of nanotechnology. This is the reason why MIC is serious about launching a national research initiative program of this converging technology as one of the post-IT839 strategies that will lead to a prosperous future. In the era of the nanotechnology-biology-information revolution in the future, each alone would be powerful; when combined, however, the synergic results guarantee that we will be in constant transition as one breakthrough or innovation follows another. We could imagine, for example, a nano-biochip made by silicon nanowires, no more than a few thousand atoms wide, that does full medical check-ups in realtime mode by a drop of blood, or a medical device, a so-called 'nano-bio robot' that travels through the human body to seek out and destroy small clusters of cancerous cells before they can spread. While we are now enjoying the later stages of the IT revolution, we are just beginning to enter the second big wave of converging technology revolution. This revolution promises far more significant economic, military and cultural changes than those created by the Internet, once it is built on a synergistic interaction among three different areas: the nano-world, biology, and information.