By Jo McIntyre
Small Times Correspondent
Dec. 3, 2001 — NanoOpto Corp., a new company formed to mass-manufacture optical communication subcomponents on a wafer, announced today it has received $16 million from four venture capital firms.
Bessemer Venture Partners and Morgenthaler led the first round funding, and were joined by New Enterprise Associates, and U.S. Trust’s Excelsior Venture Partners III LLC. Rob Soni and Glenn Falcao from Bessemer will assume board seats along with two Morgenthaler Ventures general partners, Greg Blonder and Gary Shaffer.
With this funding and a recently completed management team, another nanotech process is about to jump out of the lab and into the private sector.
“People have been working on this for 20 or 30 years, but no one has been able to figure out how to mass manufacture subcomponents on a wafer,” Barry Weinbaum, NanoOpto’s president and chief executive told Small Times. Weinbaum was formerly with Lucent Technologies/AT&T, where he was a vice president in the Optical Networking Group.
He said the company has two core competencies: subwavelength optical elements, or components for optical networking systems; and nanomanufacturing technology that can produce nano-optical components on a chip. The components can be used in products like video displays, miniature electronics, or devices for sorting DNA molecules.
“We are an outgrowth of the 20 years of research our principal founder, Stephen Chou, did,” he said. “Instead of the very labor-intensive manual assembly processes that exist, we have an automated process” in which plastic forms itself into arrays of pillars under certain carefully controlled conditions.
“They had a technology that was fundamental and low cost and had never been applied to optics before,” said Blonder, of Morgenthaler Ventures, explaining his company’s interest in the firm. “We have probably two dozen optics investments both at the systems and the components level, so we are relatively knowledgeable,” about the industry.
On the $16 million number, Blonder said that the investment is average for this type of industry, “given that they have to set up a clean room for manufacturing.”
Developed by Chou and his students, the technology is still poorly understood from a scientific point of view, but tests and experiments have shown that thin, flat polymer film can self-form perfectly ordered micropillar arrays.
The process, called LISA for Lithographically Induced Self Assembly, makes pillars with dimensions of a little more than half a micron (a micron is a millionth of a meter). The technique involves stamping a template into soft plastic to create structures with dimensions as small as six nanometers.
It’s tedious to create the template, but after that, making the subcomponents is easy.
The company operated in “superstealth mode” until today’s announcement, but will ramp up quickly, hiring engineering, manufacturing, operations and marketing staff, and building a manufacturing lab in New Jersey.
“We have talked to lots of customers, and have made sample products that potential customers are analyzing,” Weinbaum said, “but we are not announcing our first suite of products until about March. We will be ready to ship in volume in June and will receive meaningful revenue then.”
NanoOpto, based in Somerset, N.J., was founded in mid-2000 by the company’s chairman, Stephen Chou, director of Princeton University’s Nanostructures Laboratory, and its acting chief operating officer, Howard Lee, formerly a senior vice president at Apple’s Macintosh Division, who also was a founder of Sun Microsystems, where he served as vice president of engineering.
Others on the management team include: Hubert Kostal named today as vice president of marketing and sales, Sheo Khetan, vice president of operations, Y. K. Park, senior director of engineering, and Hope Conoscente, director of human resources.