The building of very small machines. Nanotechnology involves manipulating matter at the atomic scale, resulting in faster, more powerful technology that uses smaller parts. A nanometer, which is a billionth of a meter, is only about three to five atoms wide. In early 2003, some companies were working on creating a manufacturing technology for computer chips that were 90 nanometers across, which is 30 percent smaller than the 130-nanometer computer chip technology that was common in 2002.