Foreword to the special issue on nanomanufacturing and atomic & close-to-atomic scale manufacturing (ACSM)

Nanomanufacturing (NM), developed over the past three decades, bridges nanoscience discoveries to nanotechnology products by scaled-up, reliable, and cost-effective manufacturing materials, structures, devices, and systems at the nanoscale (1–100 nm). At this scale, physical and chemical properties of the materials and tools have been dominated by classical Newtonian mechanics, although quantum confinement effects become increasingly observable. A number of top-down and bottom-up approaches were developed, including nanomechanical machining, nanolithography, energy beam machining, deposition and etching, nanoprinting, nano assembly, nano replication, etc. [1]. These techniques enabled a range of applications from medical imaging and renewable energy to sensor devices and quantum computing.