Applied Nanotechnology

CHAPTER 5 The Nanotechnology Business

This chapter addresses the questions: What nanotechnology is already commercialized? How big is the actual market? How big is the potential market? Coverage of the actual technologies takes place in the three remaining chapters of this part. Here, the main purpose is to put the whole in perspective.

Figure 5.1 summarizes the current situation. Note that the higher upstream the nanotechnology, the more indirect the final product. The more indirect, the harder it is to introduce a radical technology, since much more needs to be overturned. Until now, nanotechnology has been most prominent as a substitutional indirect technology (e.g., the introduction of 65 nm lithography in computer chips), and as an incremental ...