Nanotechnology is the biggest technical and scientific promise of our century. Its appeal is growing strongly. Being able to design and produce in nanospace could enable the production of engines so tiny that are invisible, yet they can power an artificial heart or a laptop PC, while unicellular robots could navigate our blood flow and act to repair a damaged tissues. By the same principles, we could manufacture polymeric dyes and films capable of behaving like plasma screens, so to produce photovoltaic energy on our roofs at practically no cost.

  However, there can be no nanoproducts, if we do not invest massively in nanofactories. To understand the upcoming nanotechnological revolution, we must image a radical transformation in the industrial design and manufacturing processes. The second half of the 20th century can be seen as the continuous drive toward ever more miniaturization. The technological limit of miniaturization lies in the fact that beneath certain thresholds we simply do not have the tools to remove material and physically assemble objects. For instance, microelectronics is based on the capability of etching as many chips as possible on a silicon wafer. Photolithography requires a beam of light, which, small as it is, cannot be smaller than a certain minimum size. It's the difficulty in further reducing the size of such beam that constitutes the physical limit to the working of the so-called Moore Law, which, for a given computing power, famously predicted the halving in cheap size every eighteen moments.

  Nanotechnologies work the other way around. According to Feynman, the first theoretical physicist to conceive nanospace in 1959, there is no physical law that prevents the construction of objects from the infinitesimally small to the infinitely big. In reality, what prevents us from manufacturing stuff in a space comprised between 0.1 and 100 nanometers is the lack of adequate and sufficiently cheap technologies.

  The first hurdle of nanomanufacturing is that you can't see nanospace. A nanomenter is one billionth of a meter. Designers would have to work in a space that is a thousand times smaller than the universe of microelectronics, which revolves around micron-sized objects. The point is to conceive machines that are as big as our DNA (about 2.5 nanometers). Imaging technologies are thus crucial, for making nanometric scales visible and allowing the manipulation of atoms. The second obstacle is devising technologies that assemble atoms and nanomaterials, which must be manufactured bottom-up, by applying the principles of chemistry and biology and exploiting the physical properties of new materials. As the first batches of nanomaterials reach the market, a lot of research still needs to be done and many innovations are yet to be introduced, not only in the applications of nanoproducts, but in design and manufacturing processes.