BIS Posts Minutes of Recent Information Systems Technical Advisory Committee Meeting
The Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) has posted the minutes of the Information Systems Technical Advisory Committee meeting held on April 27-28, 2005 at http://tac.bis.doc.gov/2005/042705istacminP.htm.
Of particular interest is the presentation on nanotechnology made by Don R. Kania Ph.D, president of Veeco Instruments, a manufacturer of equipment for the semiconductor and nanotechnology industry. The thesis of Dr. Kania's presentation was that nanotechnology has been over-hyped and largely misunderstood, and he prefers to call it nanoscience. He also noted that size alone is not the determinant of nanoscience - simply scaling down doesn't make it so. What does matter, he said, is when the materials properties and physics change as a result of the reduction in size. He noted that this field is in its infancy and the investment level is measured and careful. In fact, more funds are spent on nanotechnology in Asia than in the U.S. The bulk of the work is published, academic research. Dr. Kania urged the audience to watch for the developments in fabrication, measurement, and computation to gauge when the infrastructure is sufficient to displace existing technologies.
|posted by Douglas N. Jacobson| Permalink 
