In the 2020s, you may be able to buy a ''recipe'' for a PC over the net, insert plastic and conductive molecules into your ''nanobox,'' and have it spit out a computer

Matter will become software. That's not a misprint: Matter will become software. As a result, we'll be able to use the Internet to download not just software but hardware, too. So predicts James C. Ellenbogen, the nanotechnology honcho at Mitre Corp., a Pentagon-funded research center in McLean, Va.

Nanotechnology is the craft of constructing things smaller than a few hundred nanometers, or billionths of a meter. That's the span of a few scores of atoms strung together. Move automated assembly down to such scales, and the implications for manufacturing are pretty clear: Whole sectors of production could get clobbered. It could start with semiconductors in the 2010s, then spread to other small products, like cellular phones.

Ellenbogen makes a compelling case for his matter-as-software scenario. ''Think about what happens when you download software today,'' he explains. ''You're rearranging the material structure on your disk'' by changing the magnetic properties of clumps of molecules. If the guts of computers were no larger than those clumps, you could rearrange molecules on the disk to build chips. Researchers are already busy developing techniques to make pinhead-size computers, ''and the bits and pieces of these nanocomputers are far smaller than the physical structures we now manipulate to hold information on disk drives,'' Ellenbogen says. ''So someday soon, we could download hardware from the Net just like we download software today.''

New disk drives will be needed to physically reproduce some hardware downloads. One concept is to make a read/write head from a cluster of ultrasharp points to nudge atoms and molecules this way or that. Two groups--headed by Calvin F. Quate at Stanford University and Noel C. MacDonald at Cornell University--are working on that, building on a decade of experiments using the tips of scanning-tunneling microscopes and related gear to move atoms around. The first such feat came in 1990, when Donald M. Eigler, a physicist at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., wrote ''IBM'' on a nickel plate with 35 xenon atoms.

''Once we have the technology to build computers no bigger than grains of salt,'' Ellenbogen says, ''we're in a fundamentally new ball game.'' Computers that tiny will be dirt cheap, so they'll be everywhere. A computer in lingerie will tell the washing machine what the water temperature should be. Ballpoint pens will blink a warning when their ink gets low. Your shoes will let your car know you're approaching, so it can adjust the seat and mirrors and unlock the door.

COPY SHOP. But the grand slam in the matter-is-software ballpark will be the nanobox. This is a sort of futuristic copy machine that combines nanotech fabrication with today's so-called desktop-manufacturing methods, used mainly to knock out quick prototypes of new products. If you want a new cell phone, you'll purchase a recipe on the Net. It will tell you to insert a sheet of plastic and squirt electrically conductive molecules into the ''toner'' cartridge. The nanobox will pass the plastic back and forth, laying down patterns of molecules, then electrically direct them to assemble themselves into circuits and an antenna. Next, using different ''toners,'' the nanobox will add a keypad, speaker, and microphone and finally build up a housing.

Don't expect such a gadget until around 2020. The first experiments to download nanoscale computer circuits won't happen much before 2005. A decade after that, nanofab systems could be ''writing matter''--initially producing nanochips.

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