Could anyone of you tell me that how could nanobots be used for dust cleaning and to make dust cleaning devices. Also does anyone of you know what was the invention for which patent was granted in the field of nanotechnology?

Thank You
Krishna Dev

One way that they'll undoubtedly be useful: As a learning tool.

Vik :v)

It is not so much that you can manipulate silicates in liquid states (heck the crust of the Earth has been doing that for millions of years) but the fact that our infrastructure (the entire chip industry) is so much more well developed. I'd guess that worldwide one probably has several hundred billion $ invested in the manipulation of Si and SiO₂. You aren't going to touch that anytime soon with classical nanotech.

It should be kept in mind that one of the important aspects of classical "diamondoid" is strong (usually covalent) bond density per unit volume. That is one of the key distinctions between say nanotubes [pseudo-diamondoid] and spider-silk [protein based] where one is dealing with a significant difference between covalent bond density and hydrogen bond density.

Though I think I have seen a report about people either speculating on or actually creating boron-nitride nanotubes which would in theory have properties similar to carbon nanotubes I haven't seen anything similar involving silicates. Which is not to say there are not very many interesting properties that silicates can contribute within the nanoscale realm.

With regard to the specific question of "near term", I lean in the direction that silicon based devices have the edge for now. However I am aware of at least one patent under consideration (which I cannot discuss) which could lead to a shift towards the carbon-based side of things.

Robert, what are your thoughts regarding the idea of building silicate based MNT devices and nanotech? Do you think that because the silicate solids can be built even in liquid phases, whereas carbon diamondoid has to have inert or vacuum enviroments, then this silicate MNT could be more near term?

Sorry but this is way off track. If the molecules (or atoms) react with each other one is dealing with nanoassembly or nanodisassembly. If they do not react with each other there are still a host of ways they can influence each other starting with simply moving the molecules (atoms) which one is not interacting with to another location.

One could for example cite the molecules now being used to coat clothes such that they do not absorb materials that would otherwise stain them. One could call this nanotechnology though it might more properly be considered chemistry at the nanoscale level. But in any case it does not negate the fact that constructing molecules which do not react has useful purposes. As does constructing molecules that do react.

There is no problem constructing nanorobots which have various degrees of reactivity and nonreactivity. Its a simple engineering problem.

Not bad ideas, but the scales still seem mismatched at this time. I agree with the mask idea particularly if it could be extended to nanoimprint or nanoink methods. If one had a "MEMS-robot" with nm positioning accuracy and an etching/router tool such that it could modify the substrate in defined ways then you might have something. (Think of the Mars Rovers reduced to the sub-micron scale.) One could perhaps extend mask architectures beyond that allowed even by E-beams (e.g. sloped incisions, varying mask thickness, etc.).

Then if you had a large number of them (semi-autonomous) organized by a remote program (like ants?) then you would have a very interesting tool kit. This could lower mask costs by dealing with the lack of E-beam parallelism.

I'm not sure, but I think it is nearly impossible to use nanorobots because they are built of molecules (or smaller: atoms). And molecules can do only two things: react with each other or not reacth with each other. If they react there's formed a new molecule, if they don't, there didn't happen anything.

JJK

I can think of at least two ways. One is repair: it might be possible to clean specks of dust or deposit metal. I suspect that would be more useful for the masks than for individual microprocessors.

The other is positioning chips to make multi-chip packages.

Chris