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MURRAY HILL, N.J. July 31, 2002 — Hot on the heels of New York state’s SEMATECH North coup, New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey announced the Garden State’s bid to grow into a small tech powerhouse. The heart of the plan: transforming part of Lucent Technologies’ Bell Laboratories into the nonprofit New Jersey Nanotechnology Consortium (NJNC).
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While budget woes have limited the state’s funding for the project to a few million dollars this year, the consortium’s centerpiece is of great value: Bell Labs’ Nanofabrication Research Lab — with 60,000 square feet of clean rooms filled with hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment — will become the consortium’s first dedicated R&D facility and be renamed the N.J. Nanotechnology Laboratory.
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According to Om Nalamasu, NJNC’s chief technology officer and director of Lucent’s Nanofabrication Lab, the consortium will leverage decades of Bell Labs’ experience in building materials on the nanoscale. “What we bring to the table is a strong history of developing products from concept to commercialization,” said the 17-year Bell Labs veteran. Chief among those products is the Lambda Router, the first all-optical communications switch.
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Nalamasu said NJNC will be an open, nonproprietary public/private collaboration that will serve a variety of goals. Among them:
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- Provide research, fabrication and prototyping services for nanoscale and MEMS devices to universities and enterprises across many different industries, including pharmaceuticals, electronics, defense and materials.
- Help new small tech companies with R&D needed to get off the ground.
- Train scientists and technicians.
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The New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) will be the consortium’s first academic member. Nalamasu said that private companies from a range of industries are expected to join.
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“Nanotechnology is a new frontier that will require expertise in a variety of sectors,” said Nalamasu. He added that commercializing products such as nanoscale devices for drug delivery — an area of great interest to New Jersey’s large pharmaceutical industry — would require new models of commercial development.
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“A pharmaceutical company might spend a billion dollars and several years to develop their own facility for building bionano devices,” said Nalamasu. He suggested that, as part of the New Jersey group, they could achieve their goal faster and cheaper.
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What then is Lucent’s goal in offering up a piece of Bell Labs, once its crown jewel, to a cross-industry consortium? Economic reality is clearly one reason. In addition to Lucent’s financial difficulties, the spinoff of Agere Systems completed a few months ago has left Bell Labs with a facility and personnel that were all dressed up with no place to go. One of the primary objectives was to keep the small tech research labs, and the valuable people in them, operating.
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More important, according to Nalamasu, the company saw an opportunity to become an integral part of the future of small tech by building a coalition with the state’s financial and political support.
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When Lucent approached McGreevey with the consortium proposal last year, it offered him a way to help keep jobs and high-tech companies in the state. With other states — from California and Texas to Michigan as well as neighboring New York and Pennsylvania — wooing small tech with hundreds of millions of dollars, New Jersey couldn’t afford to wait on the sidelines.
Don Sebastian, vice president of research, said that as the state’s leading technology research university, NJIT was a natural fit for the consortium. Not only would NJIT researchers gain access to Bell Labs’ advanced facilities, the university was comfortable with the hybrid model that would bridge the cultures between academic and corporate research.
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Sebastian said that the increasing collaboration between government and industry in Europe and Asia meant that for the United States to remain competitive, it must find ways to help share the cost of long-range research in strategic areas such as small tech.
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He said that he expected the consortium to function like some of the Fraunhofer Institutes in Germany that conduct open research benefiting entire industries as well as proprietary research for large companies done under contract.
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Ironically, the Bell Labs of the 1940s and ’50s that produced the first transistors was able to support the decades of research such a breakthrough required because it was part of giant monopoly.
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While many applications of nanotechnology offer comparable hopes for world-changing technology, today virtually no private sector companies have the R&D resources to make such a long, hard drive alone.
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In the end, Nalamasu said he was excited by the consortium’s prospects for bringing together disparate companies and diverse scientific disciplines.
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“This new model of private/public collaboration for research and development is a great new challenge,” he said. “Five years from now I hope we will have shown how productive it could be.”