Physics and Electronics

Since the dawn of man technologies have been adopted and then evolved. From the Stone Age to the Bronze Age, each age more adept than the previous.
To master technologies was to master your environment and ultimately your foes. For eons we have been chisseling away at wood, rock, metal all the materials we use in our life to refine our instruments and achieve greater precision, control and mastery.

We approach our work from the "Top-down" working from a raw material with a crude form we would chisel and chip away the unwanted pieces until we are down to our desired object.
Even now the minuscule highways of a silicon computer chip are blasted into place by light beams in a process of lithography where roads are made like gullies blown away from the silicon landscape.

This technique may appear crude to you now but this is one of the forefronts of technology and precision.
The modern world would be no-where without it. The highways on computer chips allow electrons to deliver messages of ones and zeros with incredible speeds and accuracy. The more highways on the chip then the more processing the chip can handle, and so the more powerful the chip is.

To get a more powerful computer chip we will need to put more highways into the same space, so we will need to make the highways thinner and thinner to pack them beside each other.
The light that we use now comes from an invisible part of the light (electromagnetic) spectrum, it comes from the Ultra-Violet. This is an active and energetic part of the spectrum, it is part of the light coming from the sun that burns and can cause damage to human cells because of the energy in the punch that it packs. This energy we can use to blast away materials like silicon for our computer chip.

One way to make smaller highways uses light that cuts narrower gorges through our material, so we can pack more highways side by side. So we want a light with a smaller wavelength to do this. To use a light with a smaller wavelength than UV we start to move into the X-Ray region of the spectrum.

X-Rays are well known in hospitals for taking photos of bones and hard tissues. Anyone that has ever had an X-Ray taken knows that you have to wear a protective layer for the part of your body that is not being scanned; this is because the X-Rays are highly energetic and highly interacting. They can be dangerous by killing cells in the body; they are more energetic than UV light. They do not only interfere with human cells, but they interfere and interact with any material that they come across.

Using X-rays for lithography as before is not as simple as using UV light. It is more difficult to direct X-Ray energy with the precision that is required for an advanced computer chip. This could ultimately lead to the halt in the developments of computer chip technology.
This halt is known to those that work in the industry, as "the wall".
We are coming to the limits of what we can achieve with our old engineering and design philosophy of creating something from the "Top-down".

In order to continue going forward we need a new approach.

Enter the "Bottom-up" approach.