- Richard Feynman's 1959 'plenty of room at the bottom' speech initiated atomic-scale control, leading to modern electronics and Moore's Law.
- Current materials for AI, quantum, and energy technologies are known and lab-made but face a scale-up bottleneck, not a discovery problem.
- Intel's high-k dielectric development at the 45nm node in 2007 highlighted that the breakthrough was scaling up processing, not discovering the material.
- The scale-up challenge has physical hurdles due to materials' complex, interconnected environments and informational hurdles from fragmented, siloed characterization data.