Nanoelectronics aims to understand and harness the power of
materials at the nanometre (one billionth of a metre) scale.
This work holds the potential to create computer circuits orders
of magnitude smaller than those found on today’s microchips.
Over the past decade, the number of circuits and switches
incorporated into each square centimetre of microchip has
increased more than 100-fold. Conventional components can only
shrink so far, though. Enter nanoelectronics, a new way of
thinking about the physics of computing, and which holds the
potential to create circuits thousands of times smaller than
those possible with current technology. Launched in 1999,
CIFAR’s Nanoelectronics program focuses both on the fundamental
science of how materials behave at the nanometre (one billionth
of a metre) scale and on engineering issues such as creating new
nanomaterials used for both research and applications. Working
with devices 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human
hair, Nanoelectronics members have created