Growth UK is a National Technical Platform for Materials Innovation (NTPMI) supported initiative which seeks to bring together Research Technical Professionals (RTPs) in the UK Thin Film Growth and Deposition community through a programme of online talks, in-person symposia and best practice sharing.
Join partners from Royce at Cambridge, Imperial and Leeds for a webinar with guest speaker Dr Peter Lynn, who will be delivering a talk on ‘Democratising technologies, atomic precision manufacturing, and disrupting everything’.
About the speaker
Dr Peter Lynn is a mechanical engineer from New Zealand who has resided in the San Francisco area for the last twenty years where he has worked on early stage R&D, mostly in the energy, aerospace, and robotics fields. Early in his life he was a kite designer and kiteboarding pioneer. He originally moved to the U.S. to work on airborne wind energy (large tethered flying electric aircraft that extract power from the wind). He has worked on many different renewable energy technologies and also helped pioneer inflatable robots. While generally interested in energy systems his specific current interests include thin film space data centres, six-axis flying drone robots, high altitude drones for providing internet, and atomic precision manufacturing using nano-scale electron beam arrays.
Abstract
AI is accelerating the pace of technological change. The future is becoming harder to predict, and the consequences of being left behind are more severe. Required development times are collapsing, and the scaling rate is now almost everything. For example, terrestrial data centers are devouring the world while SpaceX space data centers promise a greater than 10x effective mass reduction by moving them to space.
Thin film membrane based space data centers, where solar power, compute, phased array antennas, and solar sail propulsion are fully integrated and distributed across a thin membrane, promise a further ~100x reduction in mass, enabling order of magnitude cost reductions and making launch costs largely irrelevant. To this end, intensive development is needed to create membrane-based phased array antennas with integrated distributed compute and optical interconnects that can achieve an order of magnitude lower mass and cost.
Atomic precision manufacturing may take us to the next level again. It is feasible to construct massive arrays of nanoscale electron beams using atomically precise Spindt electrodes and multistage electrostatic lenses that can ultimately achieve atomic precision, including scanning, deposition, and etching. It might also be miniaturized into a desktop system capable of self-replicating the atomic precision printing head. Atomic precision diamond and graphene chips are likely ultimately possible, which might improve compute performance by ~1,000x. Atomic precision manufacturing would enable the direct manufacturing of metamaterials. For example, almost every energy technology might become solid-state, offering higher efficiency and orders of magnitude higher power density. The likely applications are extensive and might touch almost every technology field. This even likely enables fusion.
November 11 2026
