Electronics Market Insertion Strategy

As described above, the semiconductor industry, is so well entrenched that the near-term key to new technology insertion is integration through complementation, not substitution. Supplementation can occur, supplanting can not, at least in the next two decades. The silicon industry also moves at lightening speed with respect to other industries. Products are constantly being replaced by updated versions, which harries even the most emotionally stable process engineers and marketers. 

An even simpler commercial entry point for a molecular electronics market might be the use of molecule or nanotube-based systems for interconnects, namely molecular electronic entities serving as the conduit for electron flow between two solid state devices. The molecules could be passive, thereby merely serving as nano-scale wires. Or they could be active so as to pass current at certain voltages and retard electron transport at other voltages, for example. In this manner, a long-needed kick could be given to a 

Finally, entirely new generations of products could be envisioned that use molecules for the central processing and memory components of top-of-the-line computers in configurations that bear little relation to present-day solid-state architectures. There are high prospects for using molecular electronics in this venue however, commercially relevant delivery times for such systems are minimally a decade away. Specific possibilities will be considered in Chapter 5. 

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