Nanotechnology has received tremendous interest over the last decade, not only from the scientific community but also from a business perspective and from the general public. Although nanotechnology is still at the largely unexplored frontier of science, it has the potential for extremely exciting technological innovations that will have an enormous impact on areas as diverse as information technology, medicine, energy supply and probably many others. The miniaturization of devices and structures will impact the speed of devices and information storage capacity. More importantly, though, nanotechnology should lead to completely new functional devices as nanostructures have fundamentally different physical properties that are governed by quantum effects
