3 ms·

"we even have really simple mechanical objects (like cantilevers) on the 100nm scale now." Interesting. Do you have a link or paper name for that?

• krschultz 16y ago
  Most of this stuff comes out of Sandia, I just googles for some quick MEMS pictures and found this link. http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~database/MEMS/sma_mems/mems.html http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~database/MEMS/sma_mems/mems.h...
  • jimbokun 16y ago
    These are labeled micro-machines, and seem to be the same things that the author calls "millitech" (both cite tiny accelerometers as an example). So it seems there are some terminology differences to sort out.
    • jacquesm 16y ago
      That's actually huge problem around the whole 'nanotech' sphere. Everybody seems to have a different definition for everything, usually the definitions tend to absurdity depending on whether the person is a skeptic or a 'true believer'. It's very boring because in the end the terminology should be secondary to the goals and how we go about achieving them.
  • shabble 16y ago
    Just skimming through those pictures, but most of the fairly complex mechanical parts, at least the ones which have scales, seem to be of the order of 10-100um. Not sure what would actually constitute nanotech there, but certainly the minimum feature size (spacing of teeth on a gear, etc) is probably <1um, which would count in my book.