Also, this blog post is about to go into the archive so its readership will dramatically drop off then. :-P

I was tempted to say that commercial motivations would make a prize almost irrelevant, but this might not be true. With a tip-directed fabrication technology, commercially practical microprocessor applications might remain remote even after it became possible to make devices on a highly non-commercial basis. If so, then a well-structured prize might be very effective.

Re. insulating materials with conductive interfaces and other surprising properties, I find these systems very interesting and have been meaning to write about them. Part of what holds me back is that there’s so much to say.

To date, atomically precise control has been in one dimension, through atomic layer deposition. Adding lateral control on a layer-by-layer basis should lead to further surprising results, but would require a qualitatively different kind of fabrication technology.

Atomically precise manipulation has been demonstrated in several tip/surface systems, but to date none have been of practical use. Most work with materials of the wrong kind, all of them are very slow, and parallel systems with many tips — in the range that can be considered today — would still be very slow.

There has been some work with potentially useful materials, however, and devices of some kinds would have practical uses even at a high cost per unit (and therefore an astronomical cost per system of chip-scale complexity). Here, I have in mind sensors that produce unique or high-value information. Really fast gene-readers might qualify, for example.

Looking forward, productive nanosystems will eventually enable atomically precise manufacturing with enormous parallelism, making the limitations I mentioned above obsolete. There’s an intermediate technology base to build first, however, so this isn’t a challenge that can be approached directly. Instead, the promise of these systems provides a motive to work on pathway-relevant technologies. A theme of my writing on this blog has been those technologies — what they are, and what’s needed to make progress.