Could NIU become the next Silicon Valley?

That’s not a question many NIU students might think of asking, yet some professors at NIU are asking just that. And there’s money and technology on the way that could lead to an affirmative answer. Even the federal government is pitching in to bring northern Illinois to the forefront of a new technology that could revolutionize nearly every field of science that uses computer technology.

When it’s all said and done, it could mean a complete blurring of the lines that today separate biology and technology, and possibly put an end to the personal computer by placing several tiny computer chips, capable of what many PCs do today, in nearly everything we use.

Sound like science fiction? It is.

K. Eric Drexler helped popularize the idea of nanoscience in his 1986 science fiction novel “Engines of Creation.” The book brought to life the possibilities of technology that could manipulate individual atoms and molecules and examine the effects such technology could have on the world as we know it. Though a fictional work, the book did bring attention to what commonly is known among physics, engineering, chemical and medical scholars as nanoscience.

It all would become possible through nanotechnology. The technology is based around the nanometer, which is a billionth of a meter. According to Scientific American, a nanometer is the width of 10 hydrogen atoms laid side by side, one thousandth the length of a typical bacterium.

NIU physics professor Clyde Kimball, who heads the NIU nanoscience initiative, said NIU will focus its research in nanoscience and nanotechnology to the study of magnetic materials for the construction of nanotransistors, which basically turn on and off circuits, representing the ones and zeros of digital signals.

Transistors are used in most electronic devices, especially computers. Transistors, small enough to be measured on the nano-scale, would be incredibly smaller and faster than those made from silicon. They could lead to data storage devices that can hold at least 200 times more information than today’s best disk drives, and they would allow computers to access that information faster.

Much of nanoscience is aimed at finding and creating new materials that eventually would replace silicon as the primary material for the manufacture of electronic devices.

The federal government has committed a large amount of resources in the development of the technology. According to the National Nanotechnology Initiative Web site, the U.S. government invested $604 million in research and development in 2002.

NIU announced in October it had acquired $2 million from NNI to pursue advances in the technology, which will give NIU a significant advantage in understanding the properties of new materials created in the labs.

Eventually, NIU hopes to lure private investments to help fund its research. Once the process has begun in earnest at NIU, sometime after March, NIU scholars say the program should advance rapidly, though much about nanoscience and nanotechnology is unknown.

The hope of these professors is that one day northern Illinois will be known for its production of small, inexpensive computer chips that can compute at a speed and reliability that are not physically possible with today’s computer technology. The other major benefit to NIU would be the technical skills its students would acquire, giving the region a large number of students who will have an understanding in what most agree will be the technology of the future.