Nanomanufacturing and characterization modalities for bio-nano-informatics systems

In the next decade or two, the feature size of microelectronic devices will continue to decrease and is eventually expected to reach fabrication and material limits. With the field of microelectronics rapidly approaching the end of its roadmap, the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) was created for the purpose of creating new technologies and to maintain the momentum of continuous scientific and technological progress. Primarily, the fields of nanoscience and nanotechnology aim to synthesize, characterize, apply, and control macro functional molecules and consist of three areas. First, the area of bio-nanotechnologies concerns that of biological molecules such as DNA, the molecule that serves as the blueprint of all living organisms. Harnessing the intrinsic functionality of these nano-sized biological molecules, i.e., DNA/RNA and proteins, will yield enormous potential for a wide array of applications (biomedical, energy, sensing, etc.) Second, diminishing electronic device feature sizes has spurred the development of new techniques for nanoelectronics and has emerged as a critical area of research. Third, these macro functional molecules possess rich potential for various new nanomaterials that have applications in bio-nano and nanoelectronics industries. Given the range of devices and applications that may be generated and addressed, respectively, through the fruition of these areas, development of novel and advanced core characterization and nanomanufacturing technologies will serve as a requisite strategy toward the realization of the potential underlying nanotechnological development. As such, this review will address how these novel technologies will be used to achieve a true coalescence of nanoscience and nanotechnology. This, in turn, will ultimately benefit the human condition by using the building blocks and fundamental findings of nanoscience to develop systems based on the fusion of biology, nanotechnology, and informatics, with embedded intelligence and emergent behavior.