Category Archives: Materials and Equipment

Nov. 20, 2006 — Raymor Industries Inc., a developer and producer of single-walled carbon nanotubes, nanomaterials and advanced materials, announced that its wholly-owned subsidiary, AP&C Advanced Powders and Coatings, is currently expanding its thermal spray coating production capacity at its new facility in Boisbriand, Quebec to address growing market demand in the aerospace, power generation, and specialized industrial sectors.

The company said it will add two new workstations, one for atmospheric plasma spraying (APS) and one for high velocity oxy fuel (HVOF) spraying to its existing APS/HVOF booth, for a total of three APS/HVOF workstations.

New infrastructure will also be put in place for a fourth APS/HVOF workstation. In addition, the company said it will install a second vacuum plasma spray (VPS) production unit. This new unit will be specifically dedicated for the coating of orthopaedic implants and other biomedical components. Raymor said all of the workstations will be installed by the end of the year.

“Through the efforts of our sales and marketing professionals, we have identified real growth opportunities, particularly in the aerospace and power generation fields. This effort has led to the decision to more than double our current coating capacity,” said Stephane Robert, Raymor’s president and CEO, in a prepared statement. “Knowing that there is a substantial and growing need in providing thermal spray coating services to the local aerospace community, and given our expertise and background in material and thermal processing, AP&C is positioning itself to capture significant market share in this industry.”

He added that with the new biomedical VPS workstation the company is entering a new market, which he considers an example of how Raymor intends to leverage its experience in thermal spraying in opportunities that span different operating divisions.

November 17, 2006 – Orders received by North American-based manufacturers of semiconductor equipment continued to slide from their peak in June (now 16% lower in just four months), as customers absorb capacity brought on with recent investments, according to new data from SEMI.

Chip tool orders totaled $1.50 billion in October, about 9% lower than September’s $1.64 billion. Semi equipment sales also have slid over the past couple of months, now standing at $1.57 billion, about a 6% decrease sequentially. Compared with the same period a year ago, however, chip tool demand seems robust — 37% higher for both orders and sales vs. October 2005, according to the SEMI data.

Stanley Myers, president and CEO of SEMI, noted the gradual decline over the past three months as the industry absorbs new capacity. “Total orders for semiconductor equipment have declined from the peak levels posted back in June of this year, though they are significantly higher than levels reported one year ago,” he said, in a statement.

The book-to-bill ratio (B:B) came in at 0.95, meaning that $95 worth of orders were received for every $100 of product billed for the month.

After slightly tweaking September’s numbers, SEMI now shows that the B:B actually slipped below the parity mark, and slid another couple of points in October. The group tacked on about $45 million in chip tool billings and about $15 million in orders, which tipped the B:B below parity.

November 17, 2006 – Sarnoff Europe says it has licensed its “TakeCharge” portfolio of on-chip electrostatic discharge protection technology to Fujitsu, for protecting the chipmaker’s 65nm CMOS IC products. The agreement covers a wide range of IC and wafer production, and TakeCharge will be deployed in Fujitsu’s IO libraries as the primary ESD solution for 65nm CMOS.

“More and more major companies [are] struggling to meet industry standard requirements such as 2kV Human Body Model and 200V Machine Model” requirements, noted Koen Verhaege, executive director of Sarnoff Europe. He added that Sarnoff is working to extend the technology to 45nm ESD design.

K&S Sees Gold Gaining


November 16, 2006

(November 16, 2006) FORT WASHINGTON, PA &#151 In a corporate review to close fiscal 2006, Kulicke & Soffa outlined developments in gold bumping for stacked packages and upward trends for gold wire.

Nov. 8, 2006 — 3DIcon Corp., a Tulsa, Okla., development-stage communications technology company, announced that University of Oklahoma researchers, under a sponsored research agreement, have filed a provisional patent application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office describing a display system that uses a combination of digital light processors and nanotechnology materials to create full-color, static volumetric, realistic 3D images that can be viewed from any unencumbered perspective.

Principal research and engineering for this system will continue on OU’s Norman and Tulsa campuses. 3DIcon owns the exclusive marketing rights for any commercialization of this intellectual property.

“The University has made several advances which should improve the current state-of-the-art in static-volume 3D displays,” said Philip Suomu, 3DIcon’s director of technology, in a prepared statement. “Recent developments using micro- and nanostructure materials offer new ways of building 3D display systems that were not possible previously. By employing the cross-discipline field of nanotechnology, researchers at the University of Oklahoma are developing methods to produce unique and viable full-color, three-dimensional displays that can be viewed in real time in 360 degrees.

Nov. 3. 2006 — Nantero Inc., a Woburn, Mass., company using carbon nanotubes for the development of next-generation semiconductor devices, announced it has resolved the major obstacles that had been preventing carbon nanotubes from being used in mass production in semiconductor fabs.

Nanotubes are widely acknowledged to hold great promise for the future of semiconductors, but most experts had predicted it would take a decade or two before they would become a viable material. This was due to several historic obstacles that prevented their use, including a previous inability to position them reliably across entire silicon wafers and contamination previously mixed with the nanotubes that made the nanotube material incompatible with semiconductor fabs.

Nantero announced it has developed a method for positioning carbon nanotubes reliably on a large scale by treating them as a fabric which can be deposited using methods such as spincoating, and then patterned using lithography and etching. The company said it has been issued patents on all the steps in the process, as well as on the article of the carbon nanotube fabric itself, US Patent No. 6,706,402, “Nanotube Films and Articles,” by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

The patent relates to the article of a carbon nanotube film comprised of a conductive fabric of carbon nanotubes deposited on a surface. Nantero has also developed a method for purifying carbon nanotubes to the standards required for use in a production semiconductor fab, which means consistently containing less than 25 parts per billion of any metal contamination.

With these innovations, Nantero has become the first company in the world to introduce and use carbon nanotubes in mass production semiconductor fabs.

The company is developing NRAM — a high-density nonvolatile random access memory device intended for use as a universal memory. The company says it can be manufactured both as standalone devices and as embedded memory in application- specific devices such as ASICs and microcontrollers.

Development of carbon nanotube (CNT) interconnects for the 32nm node is starting to make major strides. Though CNTs could potentially carry the high current densities required for next generation interconnects, it has proved difficult to grow them at low enough temperatures with the right properties, particularly with low enough resistance. Now, Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. has demonstrated selective growth of vertical bundles of carbon nanotubes in 40nm via holes uniformly across 300mm wafers at temperatures around 450°C, and with resistance as low as tungsten — edging closer to the target of matching the resistance of copper at CMOS-compatible growth temperatures of 400°C.

CNTs are one of the few materials likely to have the potential current density reaching the 1 x 107A/cm2 that the ITRS says will be needed for circuits at the 32nm node. Ballistic conduction within the tubes, without scattering, should mean lower resistance than copper circuits. And CNTs could likely be grown easily in very small via holes with very high aspect ratios, without the problems that complicate copper deposition at extreme geometries. First use is likely to be for vertical interconnects in vias at 32nm, followed by horizontal circuits in the 22nm generation.

By depositing a uniform catalyst selectively only in the via holes, and using a hot-filament CVD process, the researchers made an array of vias with some 1000 CNTs in each 2-micron hole across the wafer (figure 1, above). Key to obtaining high current density and low resistance from the interconnect were making individual CNTs with low resistance, growing a high density bundle of tubes in each via, and improving the ohmic connection between the tubes and the copper layer underneath.

CNTs with atomic structure that makes them act like metals have the lowest resistance, but they are difficult to grow. The larger the diameter of semiconducting-type multiwalled CNTs, however, the narrower their band gap, and the conductivity of these large diameter tubes can approach that of metal. The diameter of the CNT is largely determined by the size of its catalyst. So instead of the usual catalyst thin film layer — with its random scattering of catalyst clumps of different sizes that can’t be well controlled — Fujitsu researchers selectively deposited Co nanoparticles of the desired size directly in the bottom of the via holes. This also allowed them to put dense concentrations of catalyst in each via to grow more fibers.

The process for making and depositing these precisely sized nanoparticles efficiently in volume across the wafer involved creating the particles by hitting a cobalt target with a laser, then blowing them into an impact plate to quickly sort out 4nm particles by their inertia. This process is about 1000x faster than the usual approach of sorting high-density nanoparticles according to their electrostatic force with a differential mobility analyzer, making it practical for 300mm wafer volumes. The high-density particles are difficult to charge, but because this impact approach uses mass instead of charge, it works with all the uncharged particles too, netting a much higher proportion of usable particles. To selectively deposit the particles in the bottom of the via holes, Fujitsu researchers sucked them from the high-pressure chamber where they’re created (in a 1000Pa He atmosphere), down into the high vacuum (10-3Pa) chamber where they’re deposited, forming a focused particle beam that shoots into the wafer. That enabled deposition of particles evenly at the bottom of via holes as small as 40nm in diameter.

Finally, to prevent oxidation while the wafer is being moved between chambers, which increases resistance, they used TiN instead of Ti to improve the ohmic connection to the copper layer underneath.

Using these techniques, Fujitsu scientists claim to have demonstrated resistance of 0.59 Ω in 2-micron CNT vias, matching the resistance of tungsten plugs, lower than has been reported for other CNT interconnects to date. The vias handled current density of 2~3.2 x 106A/cm2 for more than 100 hours at room temperature without degradation. CNT density within these vias was about 1011 tubes/cm2, and increasing this density by a factor of ten should bring resistance down to about that of copper. Fujitsu says it’s already begun to grow CNT bundles in 40nm vias with densities close to 1012 tubes/cm2.

CNT interconnects would also need to be grown at CMOS compatible temperatures, be planarized by CMP, and be grown horizontally as well as vertically. To integrate the interconnect with dielectric, and especially low-k dielectrics, process temperatures need to held to 400°C or less. Fujitsu says its circuits with 0.59 Ω resistance were made at 510°C, and the company has grown CNTs at the desired 400°C temperatures, but they are of lower quality, and have higher resistance. The next step will be improving the current CVD process, and exploring lower temperature ones (see figure 2, below).

The CNTs can be planarized by conventional oxide CMP, as the tubes are securely attached enough tow withstand polishing at changing speeds. Fujitsu says it will next work on improving their stability under chemical planarization for better control. And finally, though still in an exploratory stage, bundles of CNTs have been grown horizontally on the wafer from a block of catalyst. — Paula Doe, Contributing Editor, Solid-State Technology and Yuji Awano, research fellow, Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd., and program manager, MIRAI-Selete carbon circuit program, SST partner Nikkei Microdevices

Fig. 1 (above): ~1000 carbon nanotubes grown in each 2µm-diameter via hole across the 300mm wafer, using hot-filament CVD. (Source: Fujitsu, Fujitsu Laboratories)

Fig. 2 (below): Higher densities of carbon nanotubes per via have brought resistance down to that of tungsten, and researchers figure further improvements in growth density should bring performance close to copper. The temperatures needed to grow high quality CNTs with lower resistance are also dropping, getting close to the 400°C level needed for CMOS integration. (Source: Fujitsu and Fujitsu Laboratories)

Around the next bend: 2007


November 1, 2006

Unpacking the year’s micro/nano agenda before the trip even begins

By Charles Choi

The past is so, well, over. But 2007 is just a few holidays away. What should you expect for the coming year? How about a global ramp of nanotube production, the first big test of alternative electronics manufacturing, and a pitched battle over nano patent rights, to name just a few items. Read on for an advance peek at these and other tiny tech trends expected to drive micro/nano commercialization in the year ahead.

Call it the year of the multiwall tube. Experts say to expect a rapid increase in multiwall carbon nanotube commercialization efforts next year.

The floodgates are opening because pioneering nanotube maker Hyperion Catalysis’ foundational patents on multiwall tubes have expired. As a result, said Sean Murdock, the executive director of trade group NanoBusiness Alliance, “We should see a broader-based experimentation with multiwall carbon nanotubes and a growth in applications that use them.”

That will enable a gaggle of competitors to start cranking out multiwall tubes for all manner of applications, and the increased supply could create some price competition. But, experts say, carbon nanotubes are hardly all alike – and the differences in quality could cause production of commoditized multiwall tubes to shift to low-cost locations.

Bayer AG in Germany and Arkema in France have been very aggressive in entering the multiwall carbon nanotube space, with Bayer showing price leadership, said Matthew Nordan, president and research director at market research firm Lux Research. CNT Co. in Korea has also ramped up production, he said. Meanwhile, Paul Glatkowski, vice president of engineering at Franklin, Mass.-based carbon nanotube firm Eikos, pointed to Mitsubishi and Mitsui in Japan as leading suppliers.

Regardless of who the premier suppliers will be and how much they can produce, said Wasiq Bokhari, a managing partner at emerging tech advisory firm Quantum Insight, the multimillion dollar question is what the demand for carbon nanotubes will look like.

Many of the exciting device opportunities – such as in computer memory, video displays or medical diagnostics – demand single-wall tubes. “Unless really interesting high-value applications are found,” Bokhari said, “I’d say they (the multiwall tube providers) will follow a commodity path for cents per pound as filler materials – for instance, in car tires – which means most of the multiwall carbon nanotube companies will close down starting next year and multiwall carbon nanotube scale-up will move to Asia to do it cheaply.”

Not everyone agrees with that assessment, however. While Hyperion and other entrenched suppliers will no doubt see a slew of new competitors, Murdock and other experts say they are, at worst, likely to see only a limited erosion in price and market share.

It’s different from the dynamic that plays out when drugs go off patent, say experts. All the knowledge the original company developed for processing the product and integrating it into supply chains helps it maintain a leadership position despite the new players and the open playing field.

“It’s very, very difficult to get consistency of morphology and purity as you go through a (manufacturing) run, and other companies that can and will scale their production will have to go through the same learning curve we’ve already experienced,” said Michael Laine, director of business development at Hyperion.


Different nanotubes, different markets: The two types of carbon nanotube at left are both single-wall but have different properties due to their chirality, or “twist”. They are generally sought after for high-value applications like electronics. The multiwall tube on the right often serves more mundane purposes, such as for additives in tires and sporting equipment. Illustration by Bryan Bandyk and Paul Manz
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At the same time, he argues, high-value applications may be gaining a foothold. Hyperion is currently substituting multiwall carbon nanotubes for carbon black in electronic applications such as in hard drives or wafer handling – applications that are considerably higher up in the value chain than automotive tires. In addition, “a lot of new processes in the electronics industry are demanding chemical or heat resistance while keeping the natural performance of a polymer, so multiwall carbon nanotubes can be used there for higher-end uses,” said Laine.

Certainly other high-value applications remain on the horizon. For example, new applications could emerge from the nanotube yarns developed by researcher Ray Baughman at the University of Texas at Dallas and his colleagues.

“You could imagine making a sandwich material there that could be incredibly stiff and strong for a construction material, and talking about millions of pounds of nanotubes needed per month,” said Bokhari. High value, meet high volume.

Manufacturing gets on a roll

Nanotubes won’t be the only newcomers claiming more space on the factory floor. Printed electronics and solar power cells will also begin to enter mass production in 2007 via roll-to-roll manufacturing innovations.

“In 2007, we’ll start to see a lot of companies start addressing how to take printed electronics out of the lab and into high volumes,” said Raghu Das, chief executive officer of printed electronic and RFID analyst firm IDTechEx in Cambridge, England.

A case in point is Nanosolar Inc. After raising more than $75 million in funding in 2006, the Palo Alto, Calif., firm will begin constructing a roll-to-roll printing plant in the San Francisco Bay area in 2007 that it says could produce more than 200 million solar cells a year – or an output of 430 megawatts – using nanoparticle ink. Nanosolar also aims to build a plant in Germany to assemble those cells into what it claims could be more than a million solar panels a year.

Nanosolar’s technology is based on thin films of the semiconductor material copper indium gallium diselenide, or CIGS. The company plans to pursue the solar farm market as well as the housing and commercial building market with roofing, walling and windows that have integrated solar energy collection.

A number of other solar cell companies are pursuing high-throughput methods as well, but not necessarily roll-to-roll printing. Halfmoon, N.Y.-based DayStar Technologies plans to produce 20 megawatts of its CIGS cells by the end of 2007 using roll-to-roll sputtering, according to Terry Schuyler, DayStar’s vice president of sales and marketing. HelioVolt, based in Austin, Texas, intends to begin construction on a factory in 2007 to produce nanomaterial-based CIGS cells based off its proprietary field assisted simultaneous synthesis and transfer (FASST) process. The company declined to disclose the volumes it intended to manufacture.


The big test of roll-to-roll processing: Nanosolar of Palo Alto, Calif., says it intends to use a major cash infusion from 2006 to begin building a processing plant for solar cells in the San Francisco Bay area next year. Photos courtesy of Nanosolar
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It is hardly a U.S.-centric trend. NanoIdent of Linz, Austria, is also investigating printable solar cells and producing devices via roll-to-roll fabrication. “They have been quietly but effectively establishing themselves as a leader in printed semiconductors for more than four years,” said Bokhari. NanoIdent was co-founded by Franz Padinger, the former chief technology officer of Konarka Austria, and has on its scientific advisory board Niyazi Sariciftci at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, a colleague of Alan Heeger, the Nobel Laureate discoverer of organic semiconductors.

In 2007, Bokhari said he expects NanoIdent to commercialize its first product, a printable organic semiconductor-based photodetector. Next year, he added, the company may also debut a printable fingerprint reading photosensor through its subsidiary Biometrics GmbH, as well as a photosensor printable onto microfluidic lab-on-a-chip devices through its subsidiary BioIdent Technologies in Menlo Park. He expected NanoIdent to have a working photovoltaic cell in 2008 that could be ready for commercialization in 2009.

By late 2007, PolyIC, a German joint venture between Siemens AG and Leonhard Kurz GmbH, should begin trials of roll-to-roll printed RFID transistor circuits with companies, IDTechEx analyst Das said. He added that Colorado Springs-based OrganicID is also going after roll-to-roll printing of RFIDs, and was recently acquired by Weyerhaeuser of Federal Way, Wash., an international paper company. “We should see a lot of packaging and paper and board companies get involved in printed electronics,” such as Stora Enso in Finland and Tetra Pak in Sweden, he said.

The field of printed electronics also needs to bring more printing companies in, said Motorola’s director of printed electronics, Daniel Gamota. He said the International Electronics Manufacturing Initiative (iNEMI) will unveil a roadmap for printed and organic electronics around February 2007, and will recruit more printers into the field as well as establish goals for the technologies over the course of next year.

Legal eagles start duking it out

All the micro/nano action won’t be happening on the factory floor, however. Some of it will take place in the courtroom. Experts have long pointed to single-wall carbon nanotubes as an area where overlapping patent claims will lead to a courtroom showdown but nanopharma may get there first.

The lawsuit expected to draw attention in 2007 is that between Irish drug maker Elan and Los Angeles-based competitor Abraxis Bioscience. Elan filed suit in July 2006 against Abraxis for infringing on two of its patents regarding nanoparticle formulations of anticancer drugs with Abraxane, the first nanoparticle drug approved by the FDA.

In 2005, Abraxis posted $134 million in Abraxane sales, a reformulation of the breast cancer drug paclitaxel. It promotes the drug with AstraZeneca. Abraxis denied the allegations and filed a counterclaim against Elan, challenging the validity of their patents and requesting a jury trial.

“People will want to watch that because there is a big, big thicket of intellectual property surrounding nanocrystalline drugs. There are some 30 companies involved, and a lot of key intellectual property goes way, way back,” said Lux’s Nordan. “For instance, Drug Delivery Services (DDS) in Germany had a milling process to produce drug nanocrystals, and is now owned by SkyePharma, which licenses the technology to Baxter. SkyePharma also purchased RTP Pharma for its nanocrystalline drug reformulation technology in 2001.”

What’s more, the case could kick off a trend. “This case is very interesting because I think it’s the start of a big wave of new patent infringement cases dealing with nanotechnology, as more patents in nanotechnology accumulate and more products reach the market,” said William Prendergast, an intellectual property lawyer at Brinks Hofer Gilson & Lione in Chicago. “The patents at issue here with Elan, assuming they’re valid, are broad enough to cover other nanoparticle formulations of drugs that Abraxis or others might have in the pipeline.”

Nano financial markets go global

For most micro/nano companies today, patenting is a global phenomenon. So, apparently, is finance.

Startups have always had problems making it past the valley of death, that difficult stage between proof-of-concept and the marketplace. It’s an especially acute problem for micro and nanotech since the extensive R&D often required can drain coffers and turns away prospective investors. As a growing number of startups have discovered, there is another nasty surprise awaiting those that make it across the valley and become a public company: the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002, which was passed in light of financial scandals at corporations such as Enron, Tyco and WorldCom. Compliance with the demanding legislation can require millions of dollars.

Now London is calling. In the last year startups have reported brokers approaching them regarding the prospect of going public on the London Stock Exchange’s Alternative Investment Market for small companies, or AIM, in order to skip the burden of Sarbanes-Oxley.

“It’s like a water balloon – if you squeeze one place, it all goes somewhere else. I would expect more nanotech companies to appear on the AIM in the next six to 12 months,” said Gabor Gabai, chair of Foley & Lardner’s private equity and venture capital practice. “There has been a tremendous amount of interest and brokers who have been talking to clients of mine about doing an AIM deal.”

Micro and nanotech startups are growing increasingly mature, and their investors are looking to cash in before their stakes get diluted by new investors. “A lot of companies are not interested in going public on American stock exchanges and subjecting themselves to all the extra expense that Sarbanes-Oxley and other rules demand of them,” Gabai said. “So they’re looking at alternative markets, and the AIM is certainly one of those.”

Beside the AIM, Gabai noted other markets in the European Union, such as Frankfurt, as well as ones in Asia could be promising. “Even central European countries are starting to have reasonably good markets. I don’t think nanotech companies will go to central Europe, but they might want to do two markets or more at the same time in Europe.”

Foreign markets not only offer less restrictive regulations, but also alternative investors. “You hear a lot of talk about a cabal of only 40 institutional investors in the United States now willing to look at nanotech companies,” Gabai said. “But there is a lot of foreign money out there a company could reach to get around this cabal.”

“No small company can afford Sarbanes-Oxley. We’re all getting driven out. And this year London’s been trolling the waters,” echoed Paul Glatkowski, Eikos’ vice president of engineering. “They’d love to bring in all that high tech. Our company and a large number of others have been courted to go IPO there. And it’s tempting. The London Stock Exchange is killing Nasdaq in IPOs, with almost twice as many IPOs in 2005.”

The challenge will be whether companies can maintain investor interest after going out on an alternative exchange. “It’s not clear yet how stable these are, how likely investors in those markets are to hold their shares and have an appetite for follow-on offerings, (or) whether you can get analysts to follow your company,” said Gabai.

Acronym of the year: EHS

In short, it’s not clear whether such markets pose a healthy alternative. But there are other health concerns on the horizon: 2007 is the year experts say ordinary people will realize nanotechnology is entering their lives in everyday things like food. And public interest groups will grow increasingly coordinated to shape popular opinion of it. EHS – or environment, health and safety – will be a major theme.

Press coverage, said David Rejeski, director of the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, will begin “moving out of technical magazines and the science section of The New York Times and into broadcast and popular magazines.” There was a story in Elle magazine in 2006, he said, and more mainstream coverage is likely to come. “We’ll probably get more pieces in fashion magazines, and those will reach millions of people, or in Consumer Reports or local newspapers, and reach whole new segments of society it never did before.”

At the same time, 2007 will also see “an explosion of NGO (non-governmental organization) activity on the national, local and international levels regarding nanotechnology, and not just in the environmental groups, but the public health and labor NGOs as well,” Rejeski said.

“The crosstalk between public interest groups has increased dramatically on this,” said Jennifer Sass, senior scientist at Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. “Plans are beginning to get made, reaching common ground on what we want to see, what information we think the public should have, what kinds of restrictions we want on the pace of nanotechnology, or if not restrictions, increases in health and safety testing.”


Kristen Kulinowski
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Kristen Kulinowski, director of the International Council on Nanotechnology (ICON), said consumer advocates will demand more oversight. “You’ll see consumer groups get interested in 2007 and start to test manufacturer claims for whether or not nanomaterials are in certain products.” ICON develops and disseminates information about potential environmental and health risks of nanotechnology. It is managed by Rice University’s Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology.

Ironically, some corners of industry will retreat from the fray. Food and personal care companies, for example, are likely to stay quiet regarding nanotech, “either halting nanotechnology research programs or pursuing them but making the word banned within their organizations,” said Lux’s Nordan. “I know of at least two personal care companies that have delivered the message from on high explicitly not allowing the words ‘nanotechnology,’ ‘nano-engineered,’ ‘nano-capsule,’ or anything else like them.” But it may remain a peculiarly western phenomenon. Nordan says nano-terminology in products is increasingly promoted and embraced in eastern Asia.

Companies like L’Oreal, Colgate and Palmolive have very strong customer relationships with nano-encapsulation companies like NutraLease in Israel or nanoparticle companies like Salvona in Dayton, N.J., “but you never hear about it,” Nordan said.

Some businesses are going out of their way to say they don’t use nanotech. Seven cosmetics companies, including Aveda, told Alternative Medicine magazine in May they have specifically chosen not to use nanoparticles in their products. “I think you may see next year that once nanotechnology reaches food, it will touch the third rail. I don’t think the nano community has any idea how much voltage there is there,” Rejeski said. “A lot of savvy NGOs are waiting for that to come out.”

The NanoBusiness Alliance’s Murdock thinks industry will “absolutely, unequivocally” increase efforts at outreach and education of the public next year. “We’re considering forums open to the public to reach a broader group, and creating a network of experts to talk about specific topics of interest, and more frequent webcasts and information online,” he said.

Murdock also said the Alliance is conferring with its members to determine whether best practices in nanotech labs and plants could be used to establish a baseline, a process he said would be formalized in 2007. Michael Laine of Hyperion Catalysis said the company already works with federal agencies on best practices for industry, and activities are underway to develop best practices for characterization, handling and monitoring of nanomaterials.

Expectations are mixed when it comes to government activity. The NanoBusiness Alliance’s Murdock expects to see the rollout of the basic level of EPA’s voluntary stewardship program in 2007, under which manufacturers would alert officials about the nano-products they are producing and tests they are running on them to understand the materials.

“I think you’ll see relatively good adoption of it,” Murdock said. The United Kingdom began its voluntary reporting scheme for industry and research organizations regarding nano-products in September.

However, Kulinowski said the relevance of the voluntary program may be challenged by reviews of 15 nanomaterials the EPA has conducted during the last two years that were reported via pre-manufacturing notices (PMNs). They ruled that one of those nanomaterials, a carbon nanotube, had unique properties that made it different from its bulk counterpart and that it therefore required more testing.

“When you look at the ruling on the carbon nanotube, you see 80 pages of absolutely nothing. It’s all been redacted – information on the specific compound, the company, the types of tests performed, and so on,” Kulinowski said. “It’s impossible to ascertain the level of scrutiny this compound underwent.”

That could turn out to be another major item on the agenda. Kulinowski pointed out that the EPA is only going to get more submissions for review of nanomaterials. Greater transparency into the EPA review process, she maintained, would benefit all the stakeholders from the public at large to the actual researchers and developers of nanomaterials and nano-enabled products.

Resolving issues must begin with an understanding of the fundamentals of both contamination and ESD control

By Roger Welker, R.W. Welker Associates

Both contamination levels and electrostatic discharge (ESD) are widely recognized as critical factors affecting yield and reliability in an ever-increasing number of industries. Although contamination has long been recognized as affecting semiconductors, disk drives, aerospace, pharmaceutical and medical device industries, today other industries-such as automobile and food production-are discovering the benefits of contamination control. ESD control has also experienced a similar growth in applications. In fact, today, control of electrostatic charge on surfaces is a widely recognized method of helping to reduce the impact of contamination, providing a synergistic benefit.

Despite the large number of degreed professionals working in contamination and ESD control, these fields remain misunderstood and underappreciated. The misunderstanding often arises because of the interdisciplinary nature of the two fields. Because so many different academic disciplines are required in order to provide a comprehensive understanding, the problems and solutions often appear confusingly complex when, in fact, the vast majority of contamination or ESD problems can be solved using very simple analysis. In addition, there is a long-standing perception that what is good for contamination control is bad for ESD control and vice versa. The following statements clearly point out why this is not the case:

1. Control of charges on surfaces in cleanrooms derives a benefit for contamination control. In this regard, selecting materials with a low tendency to tribocharge and that can be grounded because they are static-dissipative or conductive is desired. However, alone, these two solutions are insufficient in the vast majority of cases and the use of air ionization provides further benefit. Thus, the use of air ionization can provide a benefit for contamination control, regardless of the ESD sensitivity of products or processes within the cleanroom.

2. Control of electrostatic discharge in cleanrooms can provide a benefit by minimizing ESD and EM-induced microprocessor upset, regardless of the ESD sensitivity of products or processes within the cleanroom.

3. Airflow in mixed-flow cleanrooms is not optimized for performance of air ionizers not equipped with fans or compressed air sources. Fan-powered or compressed-gas ionizers are preferred in mixed-flow cleanrooms for this reason. However, fan-powered or compressed-gas ionizers can increase redistribution of contamination and can have a detrimental effect. The requirements of ESD (e.g., discharge time and float potential) must be balanced with contamination (airborne particle count, surface contamination rates, etc.).

4. Ionizers placed near ceilings or bench-mounted HEPA filters can perform well in unidirectional flow applications, particularly for controlling surface contamination. Conversely, airflow in unidirectional flow cleanrooms and clean benches can cause isolation effects or flow stratification, which prevents ionizers from achieving discharge time performance. Proper ionizer deployment must take into consideration cleanroom airflow effects.

5. Ceiling-mounted, room-type ionizers may not provide rapid discharge times. As the ESD sensitivity of devices tends toward lower voltages, only local fan- or gas-powered ionizers can achieve acceptable ESD performance. In these cases, balancing the requirements of ESD failures and contamination failures becomes precarious.

6. All ESD control materials and equipment must be qualified for contamination performance when they are used in contamination-sensitive applications. Similarly, all contamination control materials and equipment must be qualified for ESD performance when they are used in ESD applications.

7. Continuous monitoring systems are available for both contamination and ESD control applications. Their use in workstations that simultaneously require both forms of control can serve to minimize upsets in processes.


Figure 1. This illustration shows the possible effect on airflow of centering the layout of tooling within the process aisle of a cleanroom on a grade-level floor.
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Any attempt at rectifying these two problems should begin with an understanding of the fundamentals of both contamination and ESD control and with defining the specific requirements that must be met. Following this should be an examination of the available analysis methods useful for solving contamination and ESD problems, especially with regard to the selection of materials.

One unconventional approach to building a contamination- and ESD-controlled workplace avoids the conventional approach of discussing the architectural and utility aspects of room construction, and instead focuses on the airflow character within the room and how that airflow is affected by tool and workstation placement (see Figs. 1 and 2).


Figure 2. This illustration shows the possible effect on airflow of bulkhead mounting tools within the process aisle of a cleanroom on a grade-level floor.
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Cleaning processes and the equipment needed to support them must also be considered from the perspective of both the supplier and the user. Design and certification of tooling involves materials selection and evaluation of problems common to all industries affected by contamination and ESD. Continuous monitoring systems for contamination and ESD must also be taken into account.

Consumable materials and supplies should be chosen with a view toward requirements of both contamination and ESD control. In the late 1960s throughout the 1970s, many materials that were good for contamination control were bad for ESD control and vice versa. Today this is no longer true.

Of course, contamination originating from people and how to contain it must be major considerations, along with personnel behavior and discipline. Related to this is one area that has been sadly neglected-that of change-room design and layout.

Finally, overall management of the cleanroom and ESD-protected workplace environments must come into play. Companies dealing with contamination and ESD range in size from those having a single sensitive facility to multinational corporations having cleanrooms and ESD-protected workplaces on virtually every continent.

Roger W. Welker is founder and principle scientist at R.W. Welker Associates, an independent consulting firm specializing in complex contamination, electrostatic discharge, and quality control issues. He can be contacted at [email protected].

Editor’s note: This article contains excerpts from the new book Contamination and ESD Control in High-Technology Manufacturing by Roger Welker, R. Nagarajan, and Carl Newberg (John Wiley & Sons, 2006). In it, “the authors set forth a new and innovative methodology that can manage both contamination and ESD, often considered to be mutually exclusive challenges requiring distinct strategies.”

R&D UPDATES


November 1, 2006

Nano technique: fossilized liquid assembly

GAITHERSBURG, Md. – Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a novel platform for the self-assembly of experimental hierarchical surfaces in a fluid. Their work offers diverse industries a new way to generate and measure self-assembly at the nano-scale.

Creating topologically complex, self-assembled surfaces has been a challenge. If the components are mixed on a surface, that substrate affects how they assemble; if mixed in a solvent and dried, the drying process similarly distorts the results.


An optical microscope image (lower plane) shows spheres at multiple size scales self-arranging in complex “super-assemblies” in NIST’s hierarchical topology modeling system. Atomic-force microscopy (detail) shows the textured surface formed by the spheres. Image courtesy of NIST
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In a paper published in the journal Macromolecular Rapid Communications, the NIST team detailed a much simpler and faster system they dubbed “fossilized liquid assembly” to create models of hierarchical topologies in which the components are allowed to mix and assemble freely in a fluid, and then quickly “frozen” in place. The key is the use of solutions of water and a special monomer that polymerizes when exposed to ultraviolet light. Like an oil-water mixture, the fluid forms liquid interfaces that can be manipulated to create a desired hierarchical structure and then suddenly solidified with a burst of UV light.

Lead researcher and physicist Alamgir Karim estimates that it takes about five minutes to make a sample of self-assembling particles using NIST’s approach. Other methods, he notes, not only are more complicated and costly, but also do not allow the structures to form as freely. With the new technique, engineers also will be able to build complex dynamic structures and freeze them into solid form, studying self-assembly under the microscope.

SEMATECH North team pushes immersion lithography to 45 nm features

ALBANY, N.Y. – A team of engineers and technicians at International SEMATECH North have successfully used 193 nm immersion technology to pattern features narrower than 45 nm half-pitch in multiple orientations simultaneously. SEMATECH North is part of the Albany NanoTech complex within the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering of the University at Albany, N.Y. The team used 193 nm immersion at 1.3 numerical aperture (NA) with azimuthal polarization, a technique which allows for aggressive imaging of arbitrary circuit features beyond simple line-and-space test patterns.

The team used an Exitech immersion projection microstepper with 1.3 NA in combination with optical proximity correction and other resolution enhancement techniques to simultaneously image sub-45 nm linewidths along X and Y axes within the same field. The resulting “pitch,” or width of a single line and its adjoining space, was 84 nm.

Motorola, Arizona State advance carbon nanotube sensing capabilities

TEMPE, Ariz. – Motorola Labs, the applied research arm of Motorola Inc., and Arizona State University announced a key advancement in the use of single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) in field effect transistors (FETs) to sense biological and chemical agents.

Together, the research teams have developed a method to functionalize SWNTs with peptides to produce low-power SWNT-FETs that are highly sensitive and can selectively detect heavy metal ions down to the parts-per-trillion level.

Researchers have successfully tuned SWNT-FETs to sense specific agents by applying a peptide-functionalized polymer coating that does not affect their ability to transmit electrical signals. This developing sensor technology could be used to monitor a host of environmental and health issues including air and water quality, industrial chemicals and biological agents.

The work was published in a paper coauthored by Arizona State University and Motorola titled “Tuning the Chemical Selectivity of SWNT-FETs for Detection of Heavy-Metal Ions” in the journal Small.

Researchers harness DNA to direct gold nanoparticle assembly

UPTON, N.Y. – The speed of nanoparticle assembly can be accelerated with the assistance of DNA, a team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory recently found.

The interdisciplinary team, composed of scientists from Brookhaven’s new Center for Functional Nanomaterials and the biology department, found a way to control the assembly of gold nanoparticles using rigid, double-stranded DNA. Their technique takes advantage of the molecule’s natural tendency to pair up components called bases, known by the code letters A, T, G and C.

The synthetic DNA used in the laboratory is capped onto individual gold nanoparticles and customized to recognize and bind to complementary DNA located on other particles. The process forms clusters, or aggregates, of gold particles.


Researchers, standing, Oleg Gang (left) and Daniel van der Lelie and, sitting, Mathew Maye (left) and Dmytro Nykypanchuk have capped synthetic DNA onto gold nanoparticles to direct nanoparticle assembly. Photo courtesy of Brookhaven National Laboratory
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“It’s really by design,” said Mathew Maye, a Brookhaven chemist and the study’s lead author, in a prepared statement. “We can sit down with a piece of paper, write out a DNA sequence, and control how these nanoparticles will assemble.”

One limitation to the assembly process is the use of single-stranded DNA, which can bend backward and attach to the particle’s gold surface instead of binding with surrounding nanoparticles. This flexibility, along with the existence of multiple forms of single-stranded DNA, can greatly slow the assembly process.

In the Brookhaven study, researchers introduced partially rigid, double-stranded DNA, which forces interacting linker segments of DNA to extend away from the gold surface, allowing for more efficient assembly.

UD scientists use carbon nanotube networks to detect composite defects

NEWARK, Del. – Two University of Delaware researchers discovered a means to detect and identify damage within advanced composite materials by using a network of carbon nanotubes which act in much the same manner as human nerves.

The discovery has important implications both in the laboratory, where the scientists hope to better predict the life span of various composite materials, and in everyday applications, where it could become an important tool in monitoring the health of composite materials used in the construction of a variety of essential products, including commercial airliners.

The research is the work of Tsu-Wei Chou, Pierre S. du Pont chair of engineering, and Erik Thostenson, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and was published in the journal Advanced Materials.

Composite materials are generally laminates, sheets of high-performance fibers, such as carbon, glass or Kevlar, embedded in a polymer resin matrix. Chou said that the traditional composite materials have inherent weaknesses because the matrix materials – plastics – surrounding the fibers are “strong, but far less strong than the fibers.”

This results in weak spots in composites in the interface areas in the matrix materials, particularly where there are pockets of resin, Chou said. As a result, defects, including tiny microcracks, can occur. Over time, those microcracks can threaten the integrity of the composite.

The carbon nanotubes can be used to detect defects at onset by embedding them uniformly throughout the composite material as a network capable of monitoring the health of the composite structures. Because the carbon nanotubes conduct electricity, they create a nanoscale network of sensors that work like the nerves in the human body.

The researchers can pass an electrical current through the network and if there is a microcrack, it breaks the pathway of the sensors and the response can be measured. Chou said the carbon nanotubes are minimally invasive and just 0.15 percent of the total composite volume.

The research is supported by funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation.

Clemson researchers develop nanotubes to fight anthrax

CLEMSON, N.C. – Clemson University chemist Ya-Ping Sun and his research team have developed a countermeasure strategy to weaponized anthrax. The Clemson team’s findings were published online in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

“For anthrax to be effective, it has to be made into a fine powder that can easily enter the lungs when inhaled. That is what makes it lethal,” said Sun in a prepared statement. “What we have done is come up with an agent that clings to the anthrax spores to make their inhalation into the lungs difficult.”


Anthrax spores gather in clusters on sugar coated carbon nanotubes. Images courtesy of Clemson University
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Anthrax spores are covered with carbohydrates, or simple sugars, that are used to communicate with or attract other biological species. The Clemson team used carbon nanotubes as a platform or scaffolding for displaying sugar molecules that would attract the anthrax spores. When sugar coated, the carbon nanotubes bind with the anthrax spores, creating clusters that are too large to be inhaled — stopping their infection and destruction.

Sun said a similar approach using sugar-coated carbon nanotubes to stop the spread of E. coli bacteria was tested successfully in 2004. He sees this new method potentially as a way for first responders to contain anthrax in an office or mailroom setting using a water-based gel, foam or aerosol spray, and he thinks it has potential application on the battlefield in larger quantities.

55,000 tiny T.J’s show power of DPN

EVANSTON, Ill. – Northwestern University researchers have developed a 55,000-pen, two-dimensional array that allows them to simultaneously create 55,000 identical patterns drawn with tiny dots of molecular ink on substrates of gold or glass. Each structure is only a single molecule tall.

The recent advance of dip-pen nanolithography (DPN), which was invented at Northwestern in 1999 and is being commercialized by local startup NanoInk, was published online by the journal Angewandte Chemie.

To demonstrate the technique’s power, the researchers reproduced the face of Thomas Jefferson from a five-cent coin 55,000 times, which took only 30 minutes. Each identical nickel image is 12 micrometers wide – about twice the diameter of a red blood cell – and is made up of 8,773 dots, each 80 nanometers in diameter.

The parallel process paves the way for making DPN competitive with other optical and stamping lithographic methods used for patterning large areas on metal and semiconductor substrates, including silicon wafers. The advantage of DPN, which is a maskless lithography, is that it can be used to deliver many different types of inks simultaneously to a surface in any configuration one desires. Mask-based lithographies and stamping protocols are extremely limited in this regard.

In addition to Professor Chad Mirkin, other authors on the paper are Khalid Salaita (lead author), Yuhuang Wang and Rafael A. Vega, from Northwestern; Joseph Fragala, from NanoInk, Inc.; and Chang Liu, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation.

Brown engineers build a better battery – with plastic

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Brown University engineers have created a new battery that uses plastic, not metal, to conduct electrical current. The hybrid device is intended to marry the power of a capacitor with the storage capacity of a battery.

“Batteries have limits,” said Tayhas Palmore, an associate professor in Brown’s division of engineering, in a prepared statement. “They have to be recharged. They can be expensive. Most of all, they don’t deliver a lot of power. Another option is capacitors. These components, found in electronic devices, can deliver that big blast of power. But they don’t have much storage capacity. So what if you combined elements of both a battery and a capacitor?”

That’s the question Palmore set out to answer with Hyun-Kon Song, a former postdoctoral research associate at Brown who now works as a researcher at LG Chem Ltd. They began to experiment with a new energy storage system using a substance called polypyrrole, a chemical compound that carries an electrical current.


A prototype battery created at Brown University combines elements of both a capacitor and a battery. Photo courtesy of Brown University
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In their experiments, Palmore and Song took a thin strip of gold-coated plastic film and covered the tip with polypyrrole and a substance that alters its conductive properties. The process was repeated, this time using another kind of conduction-altering chemical. The result: two strips with different polymer tips. The plastic strips were then stuck together, separated by a papery membrane to prevent a short circuit.

The result is a hybrid. Like a capacitor, the battery can be rapidly charged then discharged to deliver power. Like a battery, it can store and deliver that charge over long periods of time. During performance testing, the new battery performed like a hybrid, too. It had twice the storage capacity of an electric double-layer capacitor. And it delivered more than 100 times the power of a standard alkaline battery.

Palmore said some performance problems – such as decreased storage capacity after repeated recharging – must be overcome before the device is marketable. But she expects strong interest since battery makers are always looking for new ways to more efficiently store and deliver power. NASA and the U.S. Air Force are also exploring polymer-based batteries. A description of the prototype was published in Advanced Materials.