| Why is it hard? You need to be able to position things with sub-angstrom precision from a platform that has ~nm uncertainty in the critical z positioning, and in the case of nc-AFM is oscillating to boot. And you can’t use existing tools. You need an atomically precise scanning probe tip with very specific reactive chemical structure, but NOT react with the surface while scanning with a voltage bias. And where do you source feedstock from? Needs to be delivered to the surface in passive form but be activated when needed to switch to being chemically reactive in a specific way to get it on the transfer tool and then onto the part being built. Oh, and this is without even getting into how many electronic structures are entirely invisible at certain voltages, everything looks like an identical blobish shape, surfaces are reconfiguring themselves constantly, and probes randomly crash due to piezo creep, destroying days or weeks of work. My startup has solutions to all of these problems. And the payoff at the end is reliable, scalable quantum computers, followed by full-on Drexlarian nanotech. But yeah, it’s a fiendishly hard problem. |