Such production facilities will be invaluable in the mass production of products like magnetic RAM (MRAM), a nonvolatile memory that stores bits by altering the spin of electrons. MRAM promises write speeds far faster than today's SRAM and DRAM -- according to IBM, as fast as 2.3 nanoseconds, with power consumption in the 2-milliamps range. If it could be produced cheaply enough, MRAM could be used in everything from PCs to cell phones.

IBM has also been able to use nanotechnology to build the world's smallest working transistor. The transistor gate is just 6 nanometers (roughly 25 atoms) wide. By contrast, today's 0.13-micron PC processors have transistor gates measuring something under 70 nanometers, which Intel says its 90-nanometer-process "Prescott" CPU will shrink to under 50 nanometers.

Researchers at Woburn, Mass.-based Nantero Inc. say they've developed a way to use carbon nanotubes to store data. By using buckminsterfullerenes, a.k.a. "buckyballs," to store bits, the tubes could be switched on and off in less than a nanosecond and retain their status even when no electrical charge is applied, making what the company calls NRAM a solid-state technology that could be used like a hard drive.

Threading the Needle

Hewlett-Packard is working on stringing nanoparticles together to create conducting wires. The company has teamed up with the University of California to build grids of nanowires and place molecules at their intersections; by using these molecules to block or conduct electrical current, the company has shown the viability of a nanomicroprocessor.

Although not particularly expensive to make, these nanowire grids tend to have imperfections. This requires a lot of reengineering after the chip has been made. HP is currently investigating how to use fault-tolerant software to bypass these imperfections and take advantage of the chips' processing power.

Although nanowires are small -- between 3 and 5 nanometers thick -- they have the same properties as bulk silicon. To take advantage of quantum properties, the size needs to be below 3nm. Scientists at the City University of Hong Kong have fabricated silicon wires with diameters approaching 1 nanometer, and claim to see quantum effects at work in their prototype tests.

But before the topic turns back toward science fiction, it's important to remember that the first uses of nanotechnology will be to help the chip industry maintain its performance curves and lower costs. Intel is already working at the nanoscale level with Prescott, and has announced plans to go further with its TeraHertz Transistor project for the second half of this decade. AMD has developed a transistor with a gate length of just 15 nanometers, which could be the first step toward 30-nanometer process CPU manufacture (perhaps by 2009 or 2010).