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ALBANY, N.Y., May 13, 2004 — Come this fall semester, Albany Nanotech and the University at Albany will open one of the world’s first full-fledged College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE).

On April 20, the State University of New York’s board of trustees approved a plan proposed by Gov. George Pataki in January to upgrade Albany’s current academic program, a school awarding doctorates and master’s in six areas of study, to an official college.

Located in the same fast-growing facilities that house Albany’s nanoelectronics center and the International SEMATECH North consortium, CNSE, which Albany Nanotech Executive Director Alain Kaloyeros pronounces “sense,” will be an unconventional institution bridging the academic and business worlds.

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Ph.D.s and M.S. degrees won’t be awarded in traditional fields such as physics or chemistry, but will revolve around novel multidisciplinary “clusters” such as Nanosystems Sciences and Technologies or Molecular Materials and Architectures.

Similarly, faculty won’t be hired into narrow academic silos or work within a typical departmental structure, said Kaloyeros. Nor will professor “own” their own labs in the way some at other universities inhabit tenured fiefdoms.

But professors will have the opportunity to work across disciplines, teach both students and visiting researchers from the corporate world, and keep feet in both academia research and industrial commercialization.

Professor Eric Lifshin, who came to Albany from General Electric’s nearby global research center and heads CNSE curricula committee, noted that while Albany Nanotech has a close relationship with the semiconductor industry, the scope of the college will be broader than nanoelectronics. “We’ll be working with MEMS, optoelectronics, thin films and many other aspects of nanotechnology.”

The real test, of course, is whether such a way new school can attract top faculty and students, and shape both into a new generation of nanotechnologists.

Currently, the college has about 25 faculty members and 75 students, but Kaloyeros expects the faculty to grow to 75 by 2006, and student enrollment to reach 500 in five years. Already, more than 250 researchers from companies including IBM, Infineon Technologies AG, Advanced Micro Devices and others are on site, gearing up to work in the mammoth 425,000-square-foot Albany Nanotech

complex that will be the college’s home. Albany officials expect to host more than 1,000 industry researchers by the end of 2006.

Kaloyeros said CNSE will do things that colleges haven’t traditionally done, such as work with community colleges to train technicians, tool operators and software specialists for a nanotech workforce. He also sees the college growing beyond the physical nanosciences to include nanobiotechnology and even nanoeconomics, the business of small tech.

“This is the biggest experiment I’ve ever been involved with,” said associate professor Robert Greer, who came to Albany from the Naval Research Laboratory in 1996. Greer conceded that the college’s novel strategy is unproven, and that Albany doesn’t yet have the academic brand power of a Stanford, MIT or Harvard. But for the grad students already working with him on projects such as building devices stacked on top of each other, he noted that most of them get to dive immediately into research and work in teams.

Greer, other faculty and students all said that one of the CNSE’s greatest attraction is the access it offers to some of the most advanced tools and technologies in the world which are being tested and developed through Albany Nanotech and SEMATECH in the consortium’s R&D fab. Rubbing elbows with researchers from Intel, Veeco and Motorola is another obvious appeal.

With respect to tools, a tour of the burgeoning complex included a look at the latest in atomic layer deposition tools, the Genus Strategem 300, being used to develop an advanced infrared sensor system for Raytheon. A visit to the metrology group led by Lifshin, showed a $900,000 instrument that Carl Zeiss NTS GmbH was calibrating. Michael Fancher, Albany Nanotech’s director of economic outreach, said the device was a kind of Swiss Army Knife of tools, able to take a range of images, chemically analyze a sample and even etch or carve into a surface.

For Kathleen Dunn, an associate professor with expertise in leading-edge measuring tools, the appeal of joining CNSE was a matter of “being involved in something from the start and having a role in how it takes shape.”

On the subject of measurement, James Yardley, director of Columbia University’s NSF-funded nanocenter, said that Albany Nanotech has built an impressive operation in a short period of time, but the most important question about this first college of nanotechnology is how its success will be measured.

Indeed, Pataki has put his political weight behind the college’s creation and Albany Nanotech as part of a statewide initiative to renew upstate New York’s economy by turning the capital district into “Tech Valley” to rival its silicon counterpart in California.

On that score, observers agree that CNSE will make sense if it can help solve some of the significant challenges in commercializing nanotechnology. As part of Albany Nanotech’s grand plan, it must also mint scientists and engineers who will build companies that will put down roots in the region and serve as a talent pool to attract existing firms.

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HANOVER, Germany, April 28, 2004 — Microfluidics, or the manipulation of minuscule amounts of fluids, got a good deal of attention at Germany’s Hanover Trade Fair last week. The technology has matured and its wide range of potential uses has become more apparent.

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“More people are recognizing the possibilities of microfluidics,” said Remco A. de Vos, marketing manager at Micronit Microfluidics B.V. in the Netherlands. “There is lot of future expansion room here.”

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“There is a real increase in demand for microfluidic systems,” said Holger Krenz of Steag microParts, whose company produces several microfluidic devices, including a chip the length of a matchstick and half as wide used for medical diagnostics. Tiny capillaries join the 96 wells on it and each well can hold 1.8 microliters of liquid. “People want fast results, but quality and quantity are important as well.”

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While the biomedical applications are most evident, there are also possibilities in the microsystems technology, aviation, manufacturing and metalworking industries. Microdrop GmbH, a microfluidics company founded in 1990 when the field was still newborn, sells systems that can dose very precise quantities of liquid down to the picoliter range (one-trillionth of a liter).

Such systems can glue microlenses that are smaller than 1 millimeter. The technology can also be used on megasize objects, such as airplanes. Microdrop’s NanoJet System can dose tiny quantities of oil onto drill bits during aircraft assembly, using less than 1 percent of expensive special oils that are consumed during a spraying procedure.

“The potential market is big, especially if we get more active in polymer-based electronics,” said Andreas Arp, Microdrop’s R&D manager. “Then you could see microfluidics coming into play in the electronic marking of all kinds of products, even the milk cartons at your local grocery store.”

As with any new family of technology, there have been growing pains as microfluidics makes its way into the marketplace. According to Ulrike Michelsen of Bartels Mikrotechnik, more microfluidics companies went under last year than started up.

“We’re in a kind of sorting process right now,” she said. “But the indicators are good; markets are slowly picking back up.”

A decade of commercial experience, as well as the current funding environment, has led technology providers toward a more realistic niche-market approach. Gone is the mass production vision of the 90s. The field is now characterized by the development of microfluidic modules that add value to overall systems.

“There was a lot of big hype at one time, and people talking about big demand. The truth lies somewhere in the middle,” said Krenz of Steag microParts.

The microtechnology sector at the trade fair felt the same. It, along with the Liquid Handling Competence Center, one of Europe‘s largest research and development groups working in microfluidics, held an all-day symposium on the topic to talk about current trends and ways in which microfluidic systems can improve existing products.

Microfluidics is a relatively new science that picked up speed in the 1990s. This kind of tiny-scale plumbing makes it possible to manipulate individual cells, sort proteins or monitor chemical reactions in minuscule amounts of fluid. Enthusiastic researchers say that the miniaturization and integration of chemistry and biology will fuel a revolution. What electronics did for computation, microfluidics can do for biology, they say.

The technology is the underlying principle of lab-on-a-chip devices, which carry out complex analyses, while reducing sample and chemical consumption, decreasing waste and improving precision and efficiency. The idea is to be able to squirt a very small sample into the chip, push a button and the chip will do all the work, delivering a report at the end. This application is especially attractive to pharmaceutical firms and others in the biomedical field.

Despite the hard look at reality, there is still a lot of talk about microfluidics’ bright, profitable future. A report by consultants Frost & Sullivan said new public- and private-sector funding, along with advances in technology, manufacturing and medicine, could drive revenues from $127.8 million in 2002 to $709.9 million in 2008. The report points out that new therapies are likely to stimulate demand and could catalyze the microfluidics sector. However, in the near term, the relatively high cost of the technology could hinder growth.

“There’s been a lot of talk about a boom, but we’re not sure, of course, if it’s going to come or be very long lasting,” said Microdrop’s Andreas Arp. “But even though the economy is bad right now, our products are still selling. That’s a good sign.”

April 27, 2004 — Several veterans of the micro- and nanotechnology industries have launched a new company that bills itself as a full-service nanotechnology device provider.

NanoVance Inc., based in Austin, Texas, will use the fabrication capacity and technical expertise of its partners to design, develop, manufacture, package and test devices. The company seeks to minimize the time and costs involved in getting to market, according to a news release.

NanoVance will focus on devices for life sciences, information technology, data storage and wireless communication.

Ellery Buchanan, chairman, chief executive and co-founder, was executive vice president of the New Jersey Nanotechnology Consortium. Larry Thompson, NanoVance’s chief technology officer, was the consortium’s chief executive officer. Daniel Nelson, NanoVance’s president and chief operating officer, led MEMS technological development and fabrication at Rosemount Inc.

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April 6, 2004 – NOVELX wants to do to the optical microscope what computing did to the slide rule: make it obsolete. The two-man startup in the San Francisco Bay area plans to use MEMS technology to build a miniaturized modular scanning electron microscope for commercial and defense markets.

If they succeed, they will transform how small tech research and commercialization is done today. And science classrooms will get a whole lot cooler.

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“We want to build an SEM at a cost similar to an optical microscope, with a footprint similar to an optical microscope, that gives the resolution they would get with a top-of-the-line SEM,” said James Spallas, chief technology officer and founder of NOVELX.

“And we want it to be as easy to use as an optical microscope,” he said.

The Department of Defense awarded Novelx two Small Business Innovation Research grants to try to develop a transportable and reliable microscopy device. The tool would allow military personnel to conduct imaging and analysis in the field – or battleground. SEMs can image materials in the nanoscale range.

Spallas and co-founder Lawrence Muray are using their years of experience as MEMS technologists to develop the device. Muray, who is the company president, developed silicon-based technologies at IBM, making microscopy parts called microcolumns. Spallas, whose resume includes award-winning research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has specialized for 20 years in microfabricating and micromachining MEMS devices. The two have worked together in a number of small tech companies.

Their goal at NOVELX is to replace the labor-intensive methods and expensive components found in conventional SEMs with micromachined, batch-fabricated silicon parts. The miniature SEMs won’t use MEMS per se, but will rely on MEMS processing and techniques. “Anything we make will be in an inexpensive way, in a high-volume production environment,” Muray said.

A conventional SEM costs six figures. Muray said a microcolumn alone might account for $100,000 of the price tag. Their batch-fabrication approach will allow companies to build small and integrated components that could fit into a tabletop SEM. To compete with the optical microscopes, they will need to get costs down to around $1,000.

But the market possibilities could burgeon. SEMs are essential tools for studying matter in the nanoscale and for some lithography applications, but their high costs keep them relegated to only well-funded laboratories. The electron microscopy market garnered $222 million in 1999, according to Global Information Inc., a Tokyo-based provider of market research. It claimed that the optical microscope market raked in $520 million in 2000.

Spallas and Muray collaborate with MEMS and packaging companies, an association they say has led to valuable feedback and validation. Their SBIRs require validation of the concept before another round of funding will be considered.

“We need to demonstrate the electron optics and demonstrate a design package that is realistic,” Muray said. “On a system level, we have all the pieces in place.”

They decided to establish the company in 2002 after securing the SBIR funding. They are close to wrapping up their Phase I portion under the Army’s Chemical and Biological Defense program. The Army then will determine if they merit a Phase II.

They also are in talks with NASA. Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., proposed building a miniature SEM for space exploration. They envisioned the SEM being used in robotic explorations of planets, asteroids and comets.

NOVELX ultimately is aiming for something more down-to-earth. “I want an SEM I can take in the classroom,” Spallas said.