report
1.8.1 ICT: Executive Summary

In Europe, the value of the ICT industry is around 8% of Europe's total GDP. 6% of the European workforce is employed in ICT-related fields[1]. ENIAC reported that the global market for electronics was US$1340bn in 2005, with the value of semiconductors alone at US$265bn. This share of European employment equates to about 13 million jobs.

Electronics will be one of the industries upon which nanotechnology will have the most sustained, significant impact, as so much of the technology development in this area is scaling to (or is already at) nanometre length scales.

This report considers four of the major applications for nanoelectronics and photonics: Integrated circuits, Electronics manufacturing equipment, Displays, and Data storage.

Nanotechnology for integrated circuits may lead to improvements in processor density and performance, energy efficiency and reliability. Many of the applications of nanotechnology for integrated circuits will only be realised in the mid - to long term. In terms of current applications, Intel is believed to use an atomic layer deposition process to deposit high-k materials in the fabrication of 45 nm chips

Creating integrated circuits with smaller feature sizes is likely to involve improvements to existing manufacturing technologies, and the introduction of new techniques. Some of these technologies, such as atomic layer deposition and nano-imprint lithography are largely novel, nanotechnology-based approaches. Tools based on these approaches are commercially available.

There are three main groups of nanotechnology-enabled display technologies; Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLED), Field Emission Displays (FED), and Surface-conductive Electron-emissive Displays (SED). FED/NED and SED displays are not currently commercially available. OLED displays are commercially available, albeit largely restricted to portable electronic applications such as mobile phone screens and laptops. iSuppli states that the current OLED market size is around US$ 500, with over 80 000 units shipped in 2008[2].

There are a number of nanotechnology-based approaches to the development of data storage; Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory (MRAM), Ferroelectric RAM, (FeRAM), Resistive RAM (RRAM), and NRAM (Nanotube RAM). A 2005 study by NanoMarkets projected that nanotechnology-enabled storage devices would be a $65,7bn market by 2012[3]; accounting for 40% of the total memory market.

[1] http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/ict/index_en.htm

[2]http://www.isuppli.com/Abstract/ABSTRACT%20-%20OLED%20Market%20Tracker%202008.pdf

[3] NanoTechWire, http://nanotechwire.com/news.asp?nid=1059&ntid=123&pg=11