The term “nanotechnology” has become a highly recognizable, but, outside of the scientific community, rarely fully understood symbol of everything that is ultimate in science and technology. What adds to the apparent identity problem is that the term “nanotechnology” means, and rightly so, different things to the scientists representing different scientific domains.

 

Among various ways of looking at “nanotechnology” the one which I use for the purpose of explaining the fundamentals distinguishes between “hard nanotechnology” and “soft nanotechnology”. The former is obviously concerned with physics, materials, material systems engineering and is used in reference to advance technical endeavors such as high-end integrated circuits (32 nm technology generation for instance), 2D material systems (e.g , quantum wells), 1D (e.g., nanowires); and zeroD (e.g.; quantum dots). The latter is concerned primarily with biology, molecular biology, medicine, life sciences in general. Both manipulate the matter at the atomic and molecular level, but for the different purpose (quite often using the same tools, though).

 

Obviously, an ultimate goal is an integration  of  "hard" and "soft" components, as defined above, into bio-electro-mechanical nanosystems.

 

Yes, it is a simplistic interpretation of the phenomenon known as "nanotechnology", but my experience is that at the very fundamental level it seems to be working very well. At least it sorts things out, somewhat.