Category Archives: LEDs

March 17, 2004 – IBM researchers have developed a method for making thin films of semiconducting materials that allow better mobility of electrical charges. Semiconducting materials made with the spin-coating technique typically have low mobility (conductivity of a material divided by the number of charges); the IBM team led by David Mitzi developed a way to dissolve materials with up to 10x better mobility.

The IBM team combined hydrazine with equal numbers of chalcogen atoms and semiconducting metal chalcogenide molecules (e.g. sulfur and tin sulfide) to improve solubility. Heating the film caused the hydrazine and sulfur to dissociate and evaporate, leaving a thin layer of metal chalcogenide with uniform thickness of about 5nm. Optimizing the procedure led to mobility approaching that of polycrystalline silicon, and 10x that of any previously spin-coated material and of amorphous silicon.

The scientists expect the technique will advance the use of low-cost processes such as spin coating, printing, stamping, nanoimprinting, inkjet printing, and dipping. Potential applications for the films include advanced displays, smart cards and RFID tags, sensors and photovoltaic solar cells, and phase-change solid-state memories.

March 15, 2004 — NextGen Sciences Ltd., a Cambridgeshire, England, developer of devices for microarray analysis in proteomics research, announced it closed on a round of funding.

The amount was not disclosed. The investment was led by Create Partners and an unnamed group of German investors.

The company said it will use the funds to support commercialization efforts of two recently launched products. NextGen appointed Boyd Mulvey of Create Partners to its board of directors.

The laminate substrates segment of the market, worth $2 billion globally in 2003, is leading the way and is projected to overtake lead frames as the largest semiconductor packaging material segment in 2005.

(March 11, 2004) El Segundo, Calif.&#8212If 2001 and 2002 were the dark ages for the semiconductor industry (and they were!), last year represented the start of a chip renaissance, with sales rising at a healthy 14.2 percent rate, according to data from iSuppli Corp., a provider of market intelligence services for the EMS, OEMs and supplier communities.

March 9, 2004 — Hymite A/S, a Denmark-based manufacturer of silicon-based hermetic packages for optoelectronic and MEMS components, announced it closed a second round of financing for $12 million.

Techno Venture Management (TVM) and InnovationsKapital led the round. Previous investors Vertex Venture Holdings, Dansk Kapitalanlaeg, Vaekstfonden and Olicom A/S also participated in the current round.

Niels-Kristian Hersoug, Hymite’s chief executive, said in a prepared statement that the company will use the funds and connections to continue rolling out its packaging technology.

March 3, 2004 – Former Toshiba Corp. engineer Fujio Masuoka has filed a suit in the Tokyo District Court seeking 1 billion yen ($9.2 million) from his former employer for his contributions toward the creation of flash memory.

Masuoka claims Toshiba has hauled in 20 billion yen since the 1980s from transferals of patent rights to flash memory, now a ubiquitous technology in digital consumer devices including digital cameras, memory cards, and cell phones.

It’s the most recent patent-related suits brought before the court, which one month ago handed out the largest-ever amount (20 billion yen) awarded in Japan for patent rights related to blue LED technology.

MARCH 2–NEW YORK–The antibacterial soaps, laundry detergents and other household cleaning products that have become increasingly popular in recent years apparently offer little protection against the most common germs, the first major test in people’s homes has found.

In a study involving 238 Manhattan families, those who used only antibacterial cleaners for about a year were just as likely to get fevers, sniffles, sore throats, coughs, rashes and stomach problems as those who used standard cleaners.

“This study certainly indicates that antibacterial soaps may not be necessary and may not be offering any value,” Elaine L. Larson, associate dean for research at the Columbia University School of Nursing, who led the study, told The Washington Post. “The very small amount of antibacterial ingredients in these soaps don’t seem to be doing much.”

Public concern about germs has increased in recent years with highly publicized cases of food poisoning from E. coli, “flesh-eating” bacteria and the emergence of new diseases such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). More than two-thirds of liquid soaps found on the shelves of U.S. stores now contain antibacterial agents, making it a $16 billion-a-year industry.

The Soap and Detergent and The Cosmetic, Toiletry, and Fragrance associations, however, refute the study, saying Antibacterial cleaning and personal care products do what they say they do: they kill harmful bacteria.

Research on antibacterial products featured in the March 2004 Annals of Internal Medicine focused on diseases caused by viruses, not bacteria, according to a statement from both agencies.

The research findings in this particular study are not surprising, as none of the antibacterial products tested were designed, formulated or claimed to be effective against viruses.

Depending on their active ingredient(s) and specific formulation, antibacterial personal cleansing products can be effective against bacteria that can cause odor, skin infections, food poisoning, intestinal illnesses and other commonly transmitted diseases. These products are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.

Household disinfectants and antibacterial household cleaning products depending on their active ingredients, specific formulation, and use instructions are designed to kill a wide variety of microorganisms that can live on inanimate surfaces, such as bacteria like Salmonella and E. coli, which cause intestinal illness, and Staphylococcus, which causes skin infections.

In some cases, disinfectant products and certain antibacterial products may be formulated to have efficacy against fungi and viruses. Some examples include the fungus that causes athlete’s foot; viruses such as Herpes simplex; Rhinovirus, which is the leading cause of the common cold, and Rotavirus, the major cause of diarrhea in young children. To determine the product that is right for the job, read the label.

Mar. 1, 2004 — Microfabrica Inc., a manufacturer of micro devices and microsystems, closed on $15 million in Series B financing, according to a news release.

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WK Technology Fund led the round. Previous investors DynaFund Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Partech International, ChevronTexaco Venture Equities, Zone Ventures and Atherton Venture Partners also participated.

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The funds will be used to move into a production mode and expand the company’s EFAB manufacturing process to cover additional markets. Keh-Shew Lu, a WK partner in charge of semiconductor investments, will join MicroFabrica’s board.

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Microfabrica previously raised $11 million in 2001 and $5.7 million in 2002.

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PARIS, Feb. 26, 2004 — It sometimes seems like small tech entrepreneurs aren’t always on the same plane as investors. Some say that this disconnect comes from the fact that many small tech startups are launched by academics without much experience in the business world.

“The scarcity of professional skills, or rather the combination of technical and financial skills, is one of the missing elements in the development of this kind of activity” said Orlando Arango, of the European Investment Bank.

But a German venture capital firm is trying to bridge this culture and knowledge gap.

Technostart, a venture capital firm operating near Stuttgart in southwestern Germany, focuses on seed- and early-stage technology companies. It boasts more than $100 million under management in three different funds: Beteiligungsfonds, Ventures I and Ventures II. The company’s strategy has been to hire scientists as investment managers. Who better to evaluate sophisticated technologies?

Bettina Schrick is one of four technology analysts at Technostart. Her previous job involved developing nanoparticles to be used for environmental cleanup in a lab at Pennsylvania State University. Schrick was looking for a new challenge, so she came aboard as the resident chemistry expert of the group. “We also have a biotechnologist, a physicist and a biochemist at the firm, so that we can cover all the specialties,” she said.

That expertise on hand makes it possible to have much more frank discussion with entrepreneurs on their projects, particularly when the business area is at the vanguard of science. This is often the case with small tech, which represents about a third to half of Technostart’s investments.

“The entrepreneurs work with other VCs and they are impressed that we actually understand the technology,” Schrick said. “We can ask the tough technical questions.”

That was certainly true in the case of ItN Nanovation, a company that makes nanoparticles for ceramic products to be used in ovens or in water purification installations, among other applications.

The Saarbruecken-based firm raised $3.8 million in financing thanks to Technostart. Ralph Nonninger, one of the company’s managing partners, recalled that his firm had been in contact with about 25 venture capital firms in the year they spent trying to raise the initial round of funding.

“Technostart was the only one to take some of our nanoparticles with them and examine them under an electron microscope,” he said, sounding still amazed that no one else went to the trouble. “The impression you get when you talk with VCs is that the only thing they are interested in is money. Technostart looked more deeply into things.”

Technostart’s other defining characteristic is that it offers money and guidance — essential during a company’s early stage. Scientists don’t necessarily have the training “to manage people, to write patents, to find markets or to find other applications for their technology,” Schrick said.

In the case of the ItN Nanovation investment, managerial help wasn’t really needed. Chief Financial Officer Romeo Volz and Dirk Busse, who is in charge of sales and marketing, both have extensive management experience. But Technostart’s strategic expertise did come in handy in the area of patents. ItN Nanovation now has 35 of them.

“Technostart set up different workshops with patent lawyers for us, to help us see what the most appropriate patent might be,” Nonninger said, “so that we could patent not just the product, but the technology.”

Technostart invests a minimum of $630,000 in the seed phase, keeping money aside for future investment rounds. Over time, the total investment generally reaches just more than $6 million. About 70 percent comes from institutional investors like Switzerland’s Partners Group, technology venture capital group 3i (News, Web) and the European Investment Fund (EIF). Business angels, individual investors and Dow Chemical Co. (NYSE: DOW, News, Web) contribute the rest.

From an investor’s point of view, letting a specialized venture capital group like Technostart do the pre-selection, makes sense — particularly for a funds investor like the EIF, a European Union investment body. The EIF has more than $3 billion invested in nearly 200 venture capital funds, with plans to invest substantially more over the next three years.

“The main job we have isn’t to focus on a too specific level,” said spokesman Arango. “We prefer to work with people who know the area, because it isn’t wise to throw money at activities that need to be thought through, and thought through again.”

Technostart’s formula doesn’t always work. The company has had its share of insolvencies, two of which occurred in 2003.

“In the VC business, you always have investments that don’t go that well,” Schrick admits.

The company aims for a success rate of 6 out of 10. The present success rate of the Ventures I is more like three out of 10. But there are success stories, like biopharmaceutical firm MorphoSys AG, on which Technostart recouped its investment 55 times over, when it was sold on the German stock market in 2000.

February 19, 2004 – Researchers at UC-Berkeley have created a miniature detector for testing everything from agricultural toxins to DNA, built with familiar IC manufacturing techniques.

The process begins with a laser-processing technique called “laser liftoff,” whereby thin-film components are separated and transferred from one substrate to another to build up the system-on-chip layers. An excimer laser shines pulses of UV light onto a GaN thin-film LED sitting atop a sapphire crystal; the UV light removes the sapphire substrate, leaving behind only the thin-film layer, which is transferred onto a filtering layer of cadmium sulfide to screen out the blue light. The material is then added to a photodetector on a single chip.

“It’s much the same in concept as going from separate transistors to an integrated circuit that includes many transistors on a single chip,” said Timothy Sands, team leader and now professor of engineering at Purdue U.

To create the miniature detector, a fluorescent dye is attached to specific molecules in a substance, and then illuminated by a laser; the dyed molecules absorb the light and emit a color (determined by the laser used — a blue laser results in green light emissions, green lasers generate red emissions) that is picked up by a sensor and analyzed.

The 5-micron-wide device fits on a centimeter-wide chip, and can be produced for less than $1. Scientists also have added a green LED to the device to analyze biological and chemical materials (one LED serves as a control to calibrate measurements, the other for detecting target molecules). Ultimately the researchers want to combine several colors and arrays of LED-filter pairs, creating a “spectrometer-on-a-chip.”

Tests are now underway to gauge the chip’s accuracy against traditional laser-based benchtop instruments in laboratories. Even if the chip’s performance falls short, its size “suggests a future as a portable, handheld device for chemical detection and bioassay applications in remote locations,” according to Sands.

February 18, 2004 – Applied Materials, Santa Clara, CA, reported growing earnings and revenues in 1Q04, amid strong growth in orders and customers “regained confidence” in expanding capacity.

1Q04 revenues were $1.56 billion, a 27% increase sequentially and up 48% from a year ago. The company posted a net profit of $82.4 million, compared with a net income of $15.5 million in 4Q03, and a net loss of $65.7 million in 1Q03. The results include a pre-tax realignment charge of $167 million, primarily for facilities consolidation.

New orders were $1.68 billion, up 32% sequentially and 66% year-on-year, with double-digit growth in all regions led by the Southeast Asia and China (25% of orders), Taiwan (18%), and North America and Japan (17%).

Customers who underinvested in capacity and held back on orders during the downturn “have regained their confidence” and are investing once again in capacity for 300mm fabs and other facilities, said CEO Mike Splinter.

The company is projecting 2Q sequential revenue growth of 20% with earnings of 17¢-19¢/share, with 30% sequential growth in orders.