Nanotechnology: The power of small

Summary form only given. Like no other technology, integrated electronics has changed our daily life during the past 50 years. Integrated circuits have become the indispensable resource of the modern knowledge based society: For example, without ICs, the rich multimedia experience we enjoy when using the Internet, mobile phones or digital video and audio would not have been possible. This revolutionary progress is based primarily on one major development: The continuous miniaturization - The power of small! At the beginning, structures in integrated circuits were approximately 10 mum large in lateral size, which corresponds to the size of a human blood cell. Present state-of-the-art technologies are utilizing a feature size of 100 nm and below. Today, micro-electronics is in the transition to nano-electronics and device structures are smaller as a virus. Due to the continuous downscaling, integrated circuits with steadily increasing functionality and complexity have been realized. System performance has greatly enhanced, but at the same time the cost-per-function has dropped substantially. - The power of small! Also, integrated electronics has become a major driver of the economic progress worldwide: With an average annual growth rate of 15 % per year for the past three decades, the worldwide annual market of electronics with euro800 billion exceeded the global automotive market in 2004. - The power of small! The end of the silicon roadmap has been announced already many times. However, conventional semiconductor-based transistors have been continuously shrinking at a pace which has brought us today´s cheap and powerful electronic products. Nevertheless, it is obvious that the traditional top-down technologies are becoming more and more impractical with the nanoscale. Beyond the Moore´s law era of silicon, new bottom-up methods will be mandatory to implement e.g. low-dimensional semiconductor nanostructures, like carbon nanotubes (CNTs), which offer unique possib- lities such as extremely low power dissipation, high surface sensitivity and low fabrication cost. It is generally expected, that nanotechnology as an interdisciplinary area of research which cuts across many fields - electronics, chemistry, physics, biology and engineering is capable to fill this technology-gap. This contribution will emphasize on nanotechnology for electronic applications. An attempt is made to briefly summarize the past development of macro-/micro-electronics and discuss promising technological developments and future challenges towards nanoelectronics as well.