What results can be expected in the near-term? The mid-term? The long-term?
Nanotech's development can usefully be divided into stages, for example:
- 1st generation: Passive nanostructures
- 2nd generation: Active nanostructures
- 3rd generation: Three-dimensional nanosystems with heterogeneous nanocomponents
- 4th generation: Heterogeneous molecular nanosystems, where each molecule in the nanosystem has a specific structure and plays a different role
As this is written, 1st generation products are commercially available, 2nd generation work is taking place in the laboratory, and later generations are at the computational experiment and modeling stage.