Strategies for Controlled Placement of Nanoscale Building Blocks

The capability of placing individual nanoscale building blocks on exact substrate locations in a controlled manner is one of the key requirements to realize future electronic, optical, and magnetic devices and sensors that are composed of such blocks. This article reviews some important advances in the strategies for controlled placement of nanoscale building blocks. In particular, we will overview template assisted placement that utilizes physical, molecular, or electrostatic templates, DNA-programmed assembly, placement using dielectrophoresis, approaches for non-close-packed assembly of spherical particles, and recent development of focused placement schemes including electrostatic funneling, focused placement via molecular gradient patterns, electrodynamic focusing of charged aerosols, and others

External Learning Opportunities and the Diffusion of Process Innovations to Small Firms: The Case of Programmable Automation

In this chapter, we are concerned with explaining which types of firms have failed to adopt well-known improvements in process technology. This problem has, of course, been the underlying concern of all studies of diffusion “to rationalize why, if a new technology is superior, it is not taken up by all potential adopters” (Stoneman, 1983). Drawing on various theoretical perspectives, we identify a number of different barriers to adoption. With data collected from a 1987 nationally representative sample of US establishments in 21 metal-working and machinery manufacturing industries, we then construct a multivariate logistic regression model to empirically test for the effects of these factors on the likelihood of adoption of a particular process innovation, namely programmable automation (PA) machine tools