CHICAGO, Sept. 11, 2002 — More than 100 people flooded the second meeting of the Chicago Microtechnology/Nanotechnology Community on Monday, and many of them toughed out a full three hours of presentations by area researchers, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.

The inaugural meeting in July had attracted 48 people, far more than the dozen or so that the organizers had expected, said meeting organizer Nik Rokop of nLake Technology Partners. Monday’s meeting similarly exceeded their projections. “We ran out of name tags,” Rokop said.

The purpose of the group is to put the Midwest in general, and Chicago in particular, on the small tech map by giving local players a way to network, share information and do deals.

A major new feature is scheduled to appear on the Midwest’s nanomap sometime in 2005, when Argonne National Laboratory opens its Center for Nanoscale Materials. Many attendees got their first look at plans for the 100,000-square-foot center, one of five national lab facilities being created by the Department of Energy as part of the National Nanotechnology Initiative.

Argonne project manager Derrick Mancini showed a floor plan with 12,000 square feet of clean room space for state-of-the-art nanofabrication, including biosynthesis. The center will include a multimillion-dollar nanoprobe for studying nanoscale materials using X-rays from the adjacent Advanced Photon Source. The device would be the highest resolution hard X-ray microscope in the world.

The state of Illinois is contributing the $36 million construction cost for the building, and the U.S. Department of Energy will pay to equip it. The center is scheduled to break ground in the spring and be operational by July 2005. The supported areas of research are likely to include nanomagnetism, bioinorganic interfaces, nanophotonics, complex oxides, and nanocrystalline diamond

Companies making presentations at the meeting included:

• Cabot Microelectronics Corp., Aurora, Ill., which showed early work on a micromachined X-ray source embedded in the end of a catheter for delivering spot radiation to artery blockages and tumors, and a technique called chemical mechanical planarization for smoothing surfaces and forming specific features during micromachining.
• Sister companies Process Technologies Inc., Oak Creek, Wis., and Polar Thermal Technologies, Vernon Hills, Ill. Polar Thermal co-founder Stephan Stelter, speaking for both companies, described various MEMS-based cooling devices they have developed in collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories and NASA. Process Technologies provides custom photo masks for the semiconductor, LCD, sensor and MEMS industries. Polar Thermal specializes in solving thermal issues connected with micromachining.