Home   -select a page- Books and Reports   --- interviews --- Damian Gregory Allis Robert Freitas (Part 2) Robert Freitas (Part 1) Alex Nugent Michael Anissimov Tihamer Toth-Fejel Chris Phoenix - 2 Dr. Jeremy Bailenson Britt Gillette Adrian Tymes Dr. John Robert Marlow Chris Phoenix Jennifer Elisseeff Douglas Mulhall Alex Nugent Max More Ramez Naam Dr. Randolph Levine William Frensley Konstantin Likharev Dr. Stephen Thaler Dr. Gary Mezo Jack Dunietz Hugo DeGaris J. Storrs Hall Maria Xenophontos Francis Heylighen Arthur T. Murray Deepak Srivastava Nick Bostrom Rich Goodin Robert Bradbury Mark Gubrud John Cholewa Vernor Vinge Damien Broderick Glenn Fishbine John Smart Andrew Adamatzky Jeffrey Harrow

Interview with Rich Goodin

Questions by Sander Olson. Answers by Rich Goodin.

Rich Goodin is an electrical engineer and computer scientist by training who has specialties in numerous fields, including nuclear engineering and nuclear physics. He has helped design numerous Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), including the famous Voodoo2. His latest venture, Proximal Technologies, aims to speed nanotechnology development by creating advanced methodologies and software to aid development.

Question 1: Tell us a little about yourself. What is your background, what are your occupation, etc.?
 
I have a BSEE from the University of Delaware from back in the days when there was no clear division between software and hardware engineering. My formal training has spanned a number of disciplines, from mechanical and electrical engineering to nuclear physics and nuclear engineering.  I have spent the last 20+ years switching round-robin between hardware design, software design, and system architecture. For the first part of my career, I held various technical and management positions is such companies as Sperry Univac, Evans and Sutherland and Sun Microsystems. For the last decade I've been consulting as Goodin & Associates to focus primarily on solving technical problems for my clients. Goodin & Associates focuses on hardware ASIC design, software, and system architecture in computer graphics and networking.
 
Computer graphics, my first love, has gone from a field where technical elegance and creative approaches to problems were highly valued to an exercise of applying brute computational force to problems. While the results coming out of computer graphics are nothing short of spectacular, the algorithm development and systems architecture challenges are more mundane. I have been predicting for a number of years that graphics would become uninteresting once processors were sufficiently powerful. I was caught by surprised when it actually appeared to have happened.
 
I love engineering. I am happiest professionally when solving a difficult problem and learning something new in the process. I define engineering, differentiating it from research, as the process of extending what we know just enough to produce something useful. While there is still an incredible amount of basic research required in nanotechnology, I think that there is enough of a knowledge base to begin the actual engineering of nanotechnology. I think that there is a lot of accumulated experience in ASIC design and mechanical engineering intelligent CAD that is directly applicable to create an infrastructure to design and build nanoscale devices.
 
When not working, I enjoy teaching. I am a PADI scuba instructor and also teach high performance driving in addition to racing my BMW M3 racecar. There are few things better than watching a student's reaction as he or she accomplishes something previously thought impossible.
 
Question 2: When did you first become interested in the topic of molecular nanotechnology? Was there a "Eureka" moment when you discovered that you wanted to work in the field of nanotechnology?
 
I don't know that I had a particular "Eureka" moment as to the viability of nanotechnology. I have always viewed it as a natural extension of the trend in miniaturization.
 
The "Eureka" moment for me was a few years ago when I noticed nanotech research going down down some of the same conceptual paths as early ASIC design. I remember sitting in a circuits conference in San Diego two decades ago where a paper was presented "How do we build a chip with 10^6 transistors?". I would propose that the equivalent challenge to nanotechnology is "How do we build a mechanism with 10^6 atoms?".  I think that number is about right to set a goal for a design methodology useful for creating real products.
 
I also discovered in my work with MEMS that a number of interesting nanotech methodology problems could be attacked and worked out at MEMS scale. I think that there are many significant engineering problems to solve before producing a real nanoscale product. I think that a basis for attacking those problems is beginning to form.
 
I believe that atomically precise manufacturing is possible. I also believe that the process of developing an infrastructure to create such mechanisms will produce a whole host of interesting, useful and profitable spin-offs. I also have a talent for taking ideas from widely diverse fields and synthesizing them together in new and unique ways. I can't think of a better place for me to be than in the field of nanotechnology, where mechanical engineering, molecular chemistry, system design, MEMS, and software simulation, etc. all come together.
 
Question 3: How would you describe the current investment climate for nanotechnology. Is corporate and VC funding adequate?
 
I would describe the investment climate in general as difficult, but this is not just limited to nanotech. The reality of the "dot bomb" effect in the technology sector is that a lot of the "less risk averse" funding sources have dried up by essentially losing their assets. It also seems that the expectation for profitability, both in time and initial investment, excludes investment in the type of nanotech infrastructure in which I'm interested.
 
Right now, nanotech seems to be the new darling of investors looking for the possibility of a big win. Most of the concentration is in "near horizon" applications, mostly materials science and molecular electronics. Technanogy is probably the most obvious funding source for pure materials applications. Most large computer companies have some research work in molecular electronics and semiconducting nanotubes.
 
I believe that the time scale for producing an actual nanotech consumer product is in the decade range and will probably first appear in the field of nano-medicine. Most US investors are not willing to invest large amounts of capital on that time scale. Historically, there have been funding sources outside the US with long enough investment horizons to fund a substantial nanotech effort, but these seem to have dried up during the "dot boom" days. It will be interesting to see if those sources and new domestic resources will now resurface.
 
The best private funding opportunities at the moment seem to be threefold:
 
1) "White Knight" investors: People who believe in nanotechnology and wish to fund it on grounds of belief and not necessarily financial merits. I believe that Zyvex's investors fall into this category. Zyvex's investment page at http://www.zyvex.com/Corporate/investment.html is a good example of this mindset.
 
2) Strategic Alliance: Convince an existing company to start up an effort to create a future nanotech product in their existing product space. This works well for end products but is a difficult sell for building a nanotech infrastructure.
 
3) Derivative Product: Pick a product along a development path eventually leading towards nanotech. If you can produce an initial non-nanotech product along this development path and show profitability in the short term, this will allow you to secure funding and bootstrap your nanotech development. This was the path I was pursuing in obtaining funding for my proposed company, Proximal Technologies, without success. This seemed like the best path for developing the needed infrastructure for nanotech products.
 
Question 4: What about Government funding? Some have claimed that many scientists are merely inserting the words "nano" "nanotechnology' or "nanotech" into their research projects to garner more Government funds. Is this assessment accurate?
 
I know of no one who has had major success in getting government funding outside of basic research so I have not pursued this strategy, the National Nanotechnology Initiative not withstanding.
 
The government seems to be reasonably good at funding basic research. There still remains an immense amount of basic research to develop the underpinnings of nanotech.
 
Question 5: You have emphasized the importance of infrastructure to the development of molecular nanotechnology. Are any of the R&D nanotechnology efforts, either Government of VC funded, related to developing this infrastructure?
 
Low level research projects for pushing atoms around are certainly interesting and will provide the basic building blocks for any directed atomic assembly in the future. I'm particularly interested in the low temperature work at NIST.
 
Projects such as the Silicon Fleas work at Cornell are laying both the mental and physical groundwork for future nanodevices. The architectural trade-offs for mechanisms at even the MEMS scale are non-intuitive and surprising to a classically trained mechanical engineer. Nanoscale devices will be even stranger.
 
I value the molecular electronics and nano-materials efforts for their ability to lend some legitimacy to the concept of making useful and profitable products from nanoscale engineering. However, I don't see much contribution to the type of nanoscale systems in which I am interested coming from these efforts.
 
There is some work occurring in computer simulation, but I think that it is generally focused in the wrong direction for what I want to do. While accurately simulating systems at the atomic level with less computation is a worthy goal, I think that refocusing on what can be simulated easily rather than simulating everything accurately would be more valuable to what I would like to accomplish.
 
Finally, I am in absolute awe of the biologists attempting to co-opt natural processes to generate molecular scale devices. The level of understanding and insight required is mind boggling to me. Unfortunately, I believe that the simplest of these approaches will prove not complex enough for our needs and the more complex approaches will prove too complex to function reliably. Even if my assumptions prove correct and no nanotech designs result, this research is probably valuable and will stand on its own outside of nanotech.
 
Question 6: What proposals do you have for developing the necessary nanotechnology infrastructure? How long do you think it would take to develop such an infrastructure?
 
Hand me lots of cash to fund my company:-)
 
Ok, on a serious note I'll make the following three proposals:
 
1) Develop a higher level of abstraction.
 
The current design and computer analysis of atomically precise mechanisms, while impressive, is not how I believe production nanotechnology will look. Current designs make a great argument for the possibility of useful nanotech designs but are computationally intractable. As far as I'm aware, they are impossible to analyze with ab initio methods and are difficult for even molecular mechanics to get a handle on.
 
Borrowing from the field of ASIC design, the last time I actually designed a transistor to produce a chip was two decades ago. The last time I actually hooked up a gate (a logic element comprised multiple transistors) was better than a decade ago. The last production chip I worked on had millions of transistors that were synthesized from a high level abstraction. The tool that does this constructs the logic from simple building blocks following simple connection and optimization rules applied to a high level functional description. With this approach, I waste many hundreds of thousands of gates but am able to design a complex chip in less than galactic time.
 
This approach was tried in mechanical engineering a decade ago under the umbrella of ICAD, or Intelligent Computer Aided Design. I would refocus efforts from atomic assembly to assembling building blocks of tens or hundreds of atoms. The building blocks would be specifically designed for ease of synthesis and analysis. Yes, our devices would be hundreds of times larger than the optimal versions, but we could at least design them.
 
This is not an easy task, ECAD works because the building blocks are simple and digital logic can be recursively and hierarchally built up. ICAD failed because 3D mechanical designs are not that simple. I believe we are entering the era where computers with sufficient horsepower will be available to make this approach possible.
 
2) Develop a robust technology for parallel assembly.
 
Currently, every mechanical device outside of MEMS is assembled serially. An auto assembly line is a good example of this. Imagine an assembly plant that produces thousands of automobiles at once. Now imagine that we control this process with a single set of instructions. This is pretty easy to imagine as long as their are no problems, or faults, in production. Further assume that one car out of every thousand will have a problem such as a door not attaching correctly. How do you detect and correct this problem? Even if you assume that throwing out the bad car is acceptable, how do you handle this without corrupting the rest of the assembly process for the other cars? Now scale this up by a factor of a billion. This is what would be required to assemble a nanotech device that we could see under an optical microscope.
 
Just as an efficient massively parallel computer algorithm bears minimal resemblance to its serial cousin, so the parallel mechanical assembly process bears little relationship to its simpler serial cousin. If you throw in the physics of the nanoscale (or even the MEMS scale) and the difficulties of even sensing that a fault has occurred, you begin to see the scope of the problem.
 
3) Educate generalists.
 
The current engineering education system seems to be focused on producing engineers who understand less about engineering in general and more about a particular task, such as ASIC design. I was lucky in college to have a mentor who had just left Bell Labs. I learned more from his assignments, almost exclusively "how would you" verses "get the correct answer" assignments, than any other course work I had. My background is pretty evenly versed in Mechanical, Electrical and Nuclear engineering. This allowed me to take some interesting approaches in designing computer controlled mechanical suspensions and digital reactor control circuitry that I couldn't have come up with approaching the problem from just one discipline.
 
As Fred Brooks pointed out in his 1999 Turing Award lecture "The Design of Design", we are teaching young engineers design methodologies that are not really used by experienced designers. We need to close this gap. And, as the specialization dividing lines blur at the nanoscale, more generalists are needed.
 
Question 7: What is your opinion of Drexlarian nanotechnology? Do you believe in the concept of the assembler?
 
If what you mean by an assembler is something that places systems components to build up complicated mechanisms verses some sort of self-assembly, I believe in the assembler.
 
I guess this analogy has been beaten to death, but I'll use it anyway. We do have a self-assembling form of transportation: the horse. We also have a directly-assembled form of transportation: the car. Most people choose the car over the horse due to efficiency, cost of upkeep, hassle and performance.
 
Now what I would really like is a self assembling car! Since I believe that the characteristic differences and inefficiencies that make people choose one over the other are due in large part to the self assembly overhead of the horse that the car doesn't need, I doubt that I will ever see a self-assembling car.
 
I would really like to believe in self-assembly due to its potential simplicity, but I find myself strongly in the assembler camp.
 
Question 8:   Chip designers, in keeping with Moore's Law, are continually reducing the size of active elements in microprocessors and Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs). Chemists and biologists are also gaining increasing knowledge of and control over molecules. Do you believe that the "top down" or "bottom up" approach to Molecular Nanotechnology will be more successful?
 
I believe that simple chemical reactions will not allow sufficient complexity to produce interesting mechanisms via self-assembly. I believe that modifying or tailoring existing biological systems will result in systems too complex to be designed reliably. It is possible that when we have a sufficient understanding of the underlying functionality of biological systems to use them in design, we will probably have the technology to design more efficient mechanisms from scratch.
 
Having said this, I believe the first nanotech products will be in the field of materials science and molecular and nanotube-based electronics. These "bottom up" approaches, since they address limited functionality,  will dead end pretty quickly in favor of more robust and flexible "top down" approaches.
 
Question 9: Does the U.S. stand to gain or lose influence from Molecular Nanotechnology (MNT) development? Do you think that nations such as China, with a relatively primitive technology base, can effectively compete with the U.S. and western Europe?
 
I think that technological innovation and excellence have been at the core of US influence worldwide. This gives us an edge, but not a large one.
 
Since nanotechnology is in its infancy, I think that all bets are off as to who will be able to capitalize on its promise first. I don't view nanotechnology as a derivative technology. I think it is a field in want of good ideas and insights. I think that the pivotal ideas can be as easily derived by applying thought to pencil and paper as by applying rooms of supercomputers. One good idea applied to simplify analysis and simulation could nullify machine years of computation.
 
Question 10: How long do you think it will it take for the VC community to recover the dot.com meltdown and resume investing heavily in startups? Do you believe that nanotoechnology related startup companies will ever be able to obtain funding as easily as Internet startups did during the late 1990s?
 
I think that we are looking at a few years until VC funding ramps back up to what I consider reasonable levels. I don't think that we will ever see the days again when funding is as easy to get as it was during the "dot boom", and that is a good thing. People will once again have to make a reasonable case for profitably, put in place sane management structures, and be accountable for making demonstrable progress. Even though this will restrict funding for more speculative ventures, such as nanotech, we will avoid funding backlashes like the one we are currently in the middle of. It will also promote the idea of producing tangible results with "Other People's Money".
 
Question 11:  Do you share Bill Joy's concerns about the dangers of developing technologies like nanotechnology?
 
I share some of his concerns but not his approach. I think that any sufficiently advanced and powerful technology can be co-opted for destruction. I think that we were tragically reminded of that on September 11th in the events surrounding the World Trade Center and Pentagon. I don't think that anyone other than the terrorists (and Tom Clancy) seriously considered using a commercial aircraft as a weapon. I know that I'm not about to give up commercial flying, which allows me to live North Carolina and consult for companies across the country, just because this technology has the potential for horrible destruction.
 
For me terrorist uses of nanotechology fall in the same category as biological and nuclear terrorism. It is generally  assumed that a nanotech weapon is just a bad implementation running amok. I believe that building a nanotech weapon will actually be more difficult than generating a useful nanotech product.Most people make the assumption that creating a weapon of mass destruction is actually easier than the peaceful use of the underlying technology. In nuclear engineering, it is actually quite difficult to build a fissionable device of a kiloton or so without killing yourself in the process. It is trivial to find anthrax in any nearby pasture. It is incredibly difficult to create a dispersible aerosol to turn the anthrax into a weapon. I believe that nanotechnology falls in the same category.
 
I also believe that it is easier and makes more sense to create naturally limited systems involving nanotechnology than unlimited systems which could possibly run amok. I believe most other researchers who are searching for something productive to do with nanotechnology will be of a like mind. With simple safeguards in place, we will face no more threat from nanotech than we currently face from high risk chemicals, such as Dioxin, used in the production of every day items.
 
Nanoechnology shows unbelievable promise as a powerful technology for good. Even if my Pollyanna view of the inherent responsibility of researchers and ineptness of evildoers is wrong, I believe that abandoning nanotechnology is absolutely the wrong approach.
 
We, as a species, have shown an incredible ability to turn the most blue sky ideas into reality once we have thought of them. I think that we will eventually have the ability of atomically precise manufacturing. It may not look at all like any of us think it will today. If we can think it, we eventually can do it. If it has a possibility of great benefit, we should do it. If it has the possibility of great harm, we should still do it in an attempt to mitigate the possible damage. Even if we believe that nanotech is impossible, we should still strive for it because of all that we will learn in the process of disproving it.
 
Question 12  What are your plans for the future?
 
Continue my consulting business in graphics and networking. Attempt to secure funding for Proximal Tech or find some other company where I can pursue my ideas and approaches to nanotech.

About Us | Advertise | Contact Us By Email: calin [at] nanotech.biz Copyright © 2005 Nanotech.Biz Disclaimer: No content, on or affiliated with Nanotech.Biz should be construed as or relied upon as investment advice. While every effort is made to ensure that the information contained on Nanotech.Biz is correct, the operators of Nanotech.Biz make no warranties as to its accuracy. In all respects visitors should seek independent verification and investment advice. Investing in nanotechnology, investing in nanotech, where do i invest in nanotechnology, how do i invest in nanotechnology, nanotechnology companies, nanotech companies, nanotech products, nanotech stocks, nanotechnology stocks, nanotechnology investment, nanotech investment, nanotechnology investing, nanotech investing, nanotechnology reports and white papers.