Hello,

Nano tech. is a rather big term. It covers pretty much a wide aspct of topics, e.g. Optics/Photonics or Biology.

Nano tech. is not a sudden breakthrough, rather a product of evolution of different fields of science.

Now getting to Electronics Engineering, the main topic here is the fabrication of short channel MOSFET,the channel length is on the order of a few nanometers (usually referred to as submicron devices = 100nm or less). Those device exhibit different charactersics than their peers with ‘long’channels.

Note that Quantum Mechanics is very important for device engineers nowadays where quantum effects become a dominant factor.

There are many methods to fabricate those short channel devices. The fabrication technology has been the key enabling technology that gave us insight into the submicron devices. Bare in mind, that one can make a very very short channel device in the lab, however it’s pretty uselss for the semicondcutor foundries like Intel unless you can pack say 100 million in a small silicon die. In addition to Silicon wafers, there are also SOI wafers or Silicon-on-Insulator wafers. Sometimes Silicon is just not enough so we use SiGe wafers, further we can enhance the electrons mobility hence the device siwitching speed by applying some mechanical stress(say deposit some material during fabrication) to induce some stress that would in fact increase electrons mobility. Also there are the heterosructure devices mainly used for Opto-electronic applications like laser diodes etc.

Away from devices, there is MEMS or micro-electro-mechanical-sysyem. Those are small sensors or lab-on-chip devices fabricated using the existing silicon fabrication technology. They are on increasing demand day after another, used in automobiles & even the iPhone. Their more experimental peer is NEMS or nano-electro-mechanical-system. Usually we’re talking about atoms here.

As a literature start, I would suggest starting with submicron devices. Here in NanoHub you can check out Prof.Lundstrom & Prof.Datta lectures.

Sorry for the long answer.

p.s. in case you are not that comfrotable with the online courses here, it requires knowledge of Quantum mechanics, solid state physics & MOSFET devices generally.