Fabrication methods combining printing and lithography have proven fertile. Andy Extance now asks how successful will they be outside the lab? © Felice C FrankelAbout eight carbon–carbon single bonds laid end-to-end. Roughly two sodium chloride unit cells side-by-side. These chemists’ benchmarks are useful for understanding a size far too small to see with the naked eye: the nanometre. Chemicals naturally inhabit this scale, even as electronic engineers drill ever further into it to make chips for our computers and smartphones. Now that semiconductor scientists are making commercial transistors with dimensions as small as 22nm, they face perhaps their biggest challenge...