ABSTRACT
With the turn of the 21st century, the fabrication and synthesis of new materials have become paramount either for further enhancing existing or for enabling new applications. Since the demonstration of the first working transistor at Bell Laboratories by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley in 1947, the number of transistors that can be packed on a chip has doubled roughly every 18 months. The relationship between this duration and the doubling of the number of transistors on a chip has become known as Moore’s law. Predictions of the shrinking of characteristic feature sizes in microchips have become less aggressive, concomitant with a reduction in the pace of new technologies. Nanomaterials are gaining increasing interest and are finding more and more their way from scientific laboratories to industrial applications. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
