Category Archives: LEDs

Jan. 27, 2004 — Mesophotonics Ltd., a Southampton, England, developer of photonic crystal technology, announced closing a $10 million second round of funding.

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Quester led the round. Auriga Partners, NIF Ventures Co. Ltd. and existing investor BTG also participated.

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The new financing will be used to move the company from prototyping to product development, according to a news release. It aims to bring a new class of photonic crystal optical devices to market within two years.

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Quester’s Jamie Brooke and Auriga Partners’ Francois Lainee will join the Mesophotonics board.

Jan. 27, 2004 — The new Audi A8 6.0’s headlights feature daylight running lights based on them. And 12,000 of them illuminate the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.

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Photo by Randy Montoya

 

Lauren Rohwer displays the two solid-state light-emitting devices using quantum dots her team at Sandia National Labs has developed. One is blue and the other is white.

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12,000 white LEDs illuminated the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.

They are white LEDs, full-spectrum versions of the colored light-emitting pinpoints commercialized in recent decades as ubiquitous indicator lights.

But if bigger, brighter white LEDs can be manufactured more economically, they could challenge the 100-year-old incandescent bulb in the multibillion-dollar lighting market. LEDs last for years, are tough and use less energy than conventional light bulbs.

Market research firm iSuppli Corp. projects the market for high-brightness LEDs will grow from $1.53 billion in 2003 to $2.85 billion in 2007.

According to Bob Steele, an analyst with Strategies Unlimited in Mountain View, Calif., the market for high-brightness LEDs grew 50 percent in 2002 and should match that in 2003. Two of the biggest current markets for bright LEDs, he said, are cell phone screens and automobile dashboards.

Some governments are making solid-state lighting a national priority. The U.S. Energy Department estimated in 2002 that solid-state lighting could cut the electricity used for illumination up to 50 percent by 2025, savings that could significantly reduce the associated carbon emissions from power plants.

The energy bill before Congress includes funding for the Next Generation Lighting Initiative, which calls for $50 million a year over 10 years to advance solid-state lighting.

In the meantime, the Energy Department is supporting research on how quantum dots could boost the performance of solid-state lighting devices and funding work on better ways to control the nanostructure of semiconducting materials in white LEDs.

The power of LEDs has almost doubled every two years over the last decade, but much improvement is still needed to make white LEDs viable in wider markets. They cost as much as 50 times more than conventional bulbs that sell for 40 cents apiece. And while LEDs are more energy efficient than incandescent bulbs, they aren’t yet as frugal as fluorescent tubes.

According to Tim Whitaker, editor of Compound Semiconductor, the industry is looking to improve the “cost per lumen” of LEDs by, among other things, developing lower-cost starting materials.

But for white LEDs to become more affordable for consumers, experts say, breakthroughs will be required in areas such as the precise layering of semiconducting materials like gallium nitride used in many white LEDs.

Some of the firms in the white-light hunt: LumiLeds Lighting LLC, a partnership between Agilent Technologies and Philips Lighting that produces the Audi’s trick running lights; OSRAM Opto Semiconductors, a subsidiary of the German lamp maker that supplied the devices that light up Jefferson’s monument.

Other LED players include Toyoda Gosei Optoelectronics and Nichia Corp. in Japan; Cree Inc. in Durham, N.C.; and GELcore Inc., a venture between General Electric Lighting and Emcore Corp.

In July 2003, Sandia National Laboratories announced that researchers had built the first devices that used encapsulated quantum dots, or nanocrystals, to produce white and blue LED light. Quantum dots can absorb one kind of light and emit another. The scientists employed an LED that emitted near-ultraviolet light. The quantum dots absorbed the ultraviolet light and then produced visible light controlled by the size and chemical surface of the quantum dots.

A mixture of quantum dots could be a good alternative to the yellow phosphors currently used to help blue LEDs produce relatively “white” light. The dots could emit a wider spectrum of light than a single phosphor material, and because of their size, are less likely to scatter an LED’s light output.

Evident Technologies in Troy, N.Y., is also working on solid-state lighting applications for its quantum dots. Marketing Director Steven Talbot noted that quantum dots with a range of precise optical properties could be incorporated into the epoxy lens atop an LED to shift the resulting light to a warmer and fuller white light. He added that an LED-type device could be built entirely on quantum dots rather than bulk semiconductor materials because quantum dots glow when stimulated electrically.

Nadarajah Narendran, director of research at the Lighting Research Center (LRC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, said that his group is identifying applications that can significantly benefit from LED technology — for example, how white LEDs could light refrigerator cases in supermarkets more efficiently.

Another intriguing possibility for LEDs, said Narendran, is for more flexible lighting. Unlike the static light fixtures we presently have, homes and offices could be illuminated with systems that can produce different shades of white light depending on the time of day or preferences. Auto manufacturers are already looking to develop advanced headlights using LEDs, and electronic control systems that can change the headlight beam and direction.

Jan. 21, 2004 — Proteus Biomedical, a Menlo Park, Calif., developer of MEMS devices to treat congestive heart failure, raised $5.3 million in a Series B round of financing, according to the company’s chief executive. The company’s Series A was a seed round.

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Adams Street Partners led the financing. Asset Management Partners, Fletcher Spaght Ventures and Spring Ridge Ventures also participated.

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Andrew Thompson, Proteus’ CEO, said the company is developing systems composed of circuits, sensors and actuators to enable heart failure therapies. Thompson said physicians could treat problems that cause heart failure more effectively if they had sophisticated feedback from patients.

Jan. 20, 2004 — Your cell phone, like an increasing number of electronic devices, constantly drinks electricity to maintain its memory. If you could somehow get it to sip instead of gulp, you might get a week from the battery instead of a day.

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ZettaCore intends to use molecules that can store charge in next-generation memory chips. Thousands or more of the molecules would store electric charge — representing information — inside each cell of a memory array. The technology uses existing fabrication technologies and processes but accommodates smaller scale features.
That’s one potential benefit of technology under development at ZettaCore Inc. (News, Web), a Denver, Colo., developer of molecular memory. It might also sound like just one more rendition of the “nanotechnology will change the world” song — except for three salient facts:

  • ZettaCore has an experienced management team and a world class board of directors;

  • It has a working prototype that it is demonstrating to investors and potential collaborators;

  • And it was expected to announce today that Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers — a venerated venture capital firm and an investor in the likes of America Online, Genentech and Netscape — has taken an equity stake in ZettaCore.

“I think ZettaCore is the tip of the molecular electronics wedge that will ultimately evolve into mainstream nanoelectronics, displacing highly scaled semiconductors,” Herb Goronkin, a former Motorola executive and a ZettaCore board member, said in an e-mail interview.

Apparently entertaining the same thoughts is Kleiner, which led the $17.5 million second funding round ZettaCore is announcing today. All of the company’s previous backers — including Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Radius Ventures, Oxford Biosciences, Access Ventures, Garrett Capital and Stanford University — also participated in the second round. (ZettaCore was founded in 1999. The funding announced today – which closed in December – brings the total amount raised to $23 million.)

“Not many people believe molecular memory is feasible in the short term,” said Vinod Khosla, a general partner at Kleiner Perkins who is also on the ZettaCore board. But, Khosla said, ZettaCore has proven various aspects of the technology. “They have made a lot of technical progress.”

ZettaCore uses molecules called porphyrins to store the 1s and 0s that comprise digital data. Adding or subtracting electrons changes the molecules’ charge, which is used to represent data.

The company says it offers the promise of faster memory that stores more information in less space. Such memory could also retain information for minutes — or even longer — without electricity, which could dramatically reduce the power required by portable devices.

The trio of founding scientists — chemists Werner Kuhr, David Bocian and Jonathan Lindsey — originally developed ZettaCore’s technology in academia. Kuhr left his position at the University of California, Riverside, to join ZettaCore as vice president of research.

Bocian, of UC-Riverside, and Lindsey, of North Carolina State University, published a paper in the Nov. 28 issue of Science in which they said tests showed how molecular memory is tough enough for current manufacturing techniques and reliable enough for real-world applications.

ZettaCore will use the infusion of funds for “commercialization of early product” over the next 12 to 36 months, according to Randy Levine, president and chief executive. The company’s prototype, he said, “looks and acts like a memory chip,” and was produced at “a commercially interesting scale,” though he declined to elaborate. Levine said ZettaCore, which employs 15 people, will also complete its ongoing move of commercial development activities from Raleigh, N.C., to Denver, Colo., and hire more staff.

Under ZettaCore’s business plan, the company will work initially with existing memory manufacturing methods, applying its molecules to wafers in what amounts to a molecular/CMOS hybrid approach. That, said Levine, could lead to memory chip features equaling that of current 90-nanometer microprocessors. (Currently, memory is manufactured with larger features.)

Further down the road, ZettaCore’s technology is a good candidate to mate with next-generation nanocircuit manufacturing techniques — such as nanoimprinting or self-assembling nanowires — for a pure nano memory device that could scale below the limitations of lithography.

While he’s a believer in the technology, Goronkin said overexcited expectations could be more of a hindrance than help. “Getting a new product such as a molecular memory to the point of satisfactory reproducibility and reliability takes time,” he said. “It just cannot be rushed.”

Goronkin, Motorola’s recently retired vice president and director of research, joined the board in July. Les Vadasz, former executive vice president of Intel Corp., joined in December. Intel announced last week that it was collaborating with Nanosys Inc. (Profile, News, Web) on nanotech-enabled memory. Kleiner’s Khosla, a co-founder and former CEO of Sun Microsystems, joined the board with the closing of the second round.

All three bring industry connections that could be critical to ZettaCore’s success. But don’t necessarily expect an early acquisition. “We’ve got to believe a company can be large and independent before we invest,” Khosla said.

CMP firm secures funding


January 16, 2004

January 16, 2004 – PsiloQuest, Orlando, FL, a manufacturer of polishing pads used in chemical mechanical planarization (CMP) processes, has closed a $7.0 million round of Series B funding.

The round was led by NGen Partners and new investors DuPont, Air Products and Chemicals, and Cycad Group. Existing investors that contributed were Aurora Funds, Grace Venture Partners, and Greyhound Fund LP.

Proceeds will be used for expanding manufacturing capacity and building up sales and marketing infrastructure. The company’s technology, launched in 2Q03, aims to reduce slurry consumption by up to 30%. It expects to announce its first customers in 1Q04.

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Jan. 16, 2004 — A Swiss-based firm plans to be among the first in Europe to raise a nanotechnology venture capital fund.

Zurich based NanoDimension AG is currently attempting to raise as much as $93 million to invest in nanotechnology, despite a decision by German investment group Capital Stage to abandon its own plans for a $120 million fund. Capital Stage decided not to pursue its fund after one year and discussions with 400 potential limited partners. It had been backing a Zurich-based team, led by fund manager Berndt Samsinger, and was targeting instrument, biotech and nanomaterials companies.

NanoDimension was founded by nanotech researcher Aymeric Sallin, a former management consultant. The other partner is Daniel Richner, who previously established a biotech fund for Swiss private bank and fund manager Lombard Odier.

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NanoDimension is looking to invest between $4 million and $6 million in as many as 20 companies. The fund will focus on nanotechnology applications in electronics and life sciences, and is also looking strongly at energy investments — specifically photoelectric cells.

“There is no track record for this [nanotech] industry, but all of the 12 individuals involved have their good records in the industrial and financial worlds” said Richner at September’s World NanoEconomic Congress conference in London. “The attractiveness of the field is that it is interdisciplinary,” he told attendees.

Richner said that he expects to be able to raise the fund largely from Swiss-based investors. “The equity markets have improved since Capital Stage attempted to raise its fund, making investors more willing to consider this sort of fund,” he said.

Investors might gain assurance from background of the fund’s finance director, Jean-Pierre Conrad. Until 2001, Conrad was finance director of London-listed mining group Xstrata Plc.

The fund will focus its attention on a few areas. “We have a clear focus on IT electronics and life materials,” Richner said. “Energy is also a very important area of focus — for instance, the application of nanotech in the development of the next generation of solar cells.”

The science advisory board is largely composed of academics and former employees of the highly respected Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (News, Web). The chairman of NanoDimension’s scientific advisory board, Jean-Philippe Ansermet, is a professor at the Swiss institute. Other scientific advisors include Harry Heinzelmann, vice president responsible for the nanotech division at the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology. Other European investors have signaled interest in nanotechnology, such as 3i Group plc, based in the United Kingdom, and Index Ventures, based in Geneva.

January 15, 2004 – Infineon Technologies has established a new subsidiary and IC design center in China, Infineon Technologies Xi’an Co. Ltd., focusing on applications for communications, automotive, and industrial electronics.

The facility, led by Jean-Loup Leclere, GM of the subsidiary, initially will employ 1000 people with plans to expand to 3000 workers. Infineon is also working with two local universities, Xidian University and Xi’an Jiaotong University, to develop training programs.

The new operations will help support Infineon’s overall China investment, headquartered in Shanghai, where the company plans to spend more than $1.2 billion in the next few years.

JAN 1—TAIPEI–An ongoing analog chip shortage and strong demand before the Chinese New Year holidays have led to more fake analog chips showing up in China, according to sources with Taiwan-based analog IC design companies.

According to sources, the fake chips designed by small Chinese IC design companies and manufactured at 4- and 6-inch fabs in China are passed off as power management (PWM) ICs and metal-oxide semiconductor field effect transistors (MOSFETs) made by international or Taiwanese companies for use in consumer electronics.
The counterfeit chips are priced 10-20 percent lower than their genuine counterparts, sources said.

The fake chips reportedly have wrecked some Chinese-made consumer electronics products. Some Taiwan-based IC design companies have been wrongfully accused by the Chinese consumer electronics makers and plan to take legal actions against the Chinese counterfeiters, sources said.

Concerns about safeguarding their intellectual property (IP) has been the major concern for companies considering outsourcing production to the Chinese foundries, sources said.

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ZURICH, Switzerland, Jan. 8, 2004 — While many economic regions around the world are trying to foster startup company growth à la Silicon Valley, Europractice, a European research program, has inadvertently spawned more than a dozen small tech startups.

According to Giselle Roesems, Europractice’s project manager, the effort was intended to make research institutes more market-oriented and help them find industrial partners for MEMS and microsystems technologies (MST).

“The idea was to stimulate development into commercial activities and to promote services to industry,” Roesems said. But a number of research team managers licensed technologies developed in their employers’ labs to create new businesses.

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“Researchers realized there was a great opportunity to start their own companies,” said Malcolm Wilkinson of Technology For Industry Ltd, who has been active in Europractice since it started.

Roesems said that Europractice does not necessarily measure success by the number of startups to emerge. Instead, it looks at the “leveraging effect” — that is, the amount of R&D money attracted to projects. At times, this effect has been high. For every euro invested by the Union, three to six times the amount is invested by other project participants.

Another performance indicator is the number of U.S. and Japanese firms contacting Europractice for prototypes and design projects. “We’ve seen a sharp increase recently,” she said. “Frankly, we are surprised by the interest from outside the Union because of the finite range of technologies under development. But it has a lot to do with the maturity of our silicon know-how.”

Originally established in 1995 with a tiny budget, Europractice had originally planned to promote the use of MEMS and MST in Europe. To that end, it has been successful.

Bosch, a German electronics manufacturer, has built up a strong MST manufacturing business and was able to knock Japanese manufacturers out of the water with its new automotive sensors that exploit MEMS tech. It even has a small tech manufacturing technique named after it, the Bosch Process.

STMicroelectronics, a frequent participant in Europractice projects, gained a leading position in the inkjet chip market after its adoption of MST processes.

But there are plenty of firms that owe not only new competitive advantage to Europractice but also their origins, including FillFactory, Strand Interconnect AB, and C2V.

FillFactory is a 4-year-old Belgian firm that makes image sensors for original equipment manufacturers, employs 34 people and its products can be found in the newest cameras from Vision Research Inc.

In nearby Netherlands, C2V has established a MEMS and MST manufacturing business. It employs 40 people and opened a U.S. subsidiary in New Hampshire six months ago.

Strand Interconnect is a spinoff from the ACREO research lab. Founded in January 1997 with the goal of providing the packaging market with low-cost thin-film substrates, the firm has been in volume production for more than two years.

It has not been smooth sailing for all the firms that spun out of the research institutes. A number, such as INPACT Microelectronics and FiftyFour Point Seven, were shut down recently, unable to find revenue or funding.

According to Wilkinson, Germany’s CubeOptics AG, which employs more than 30 people and Switzerland’s uBlox, which now employs 40, and France’s Tronic’s Microsystems SA, are examples of some of the older Europractice’s success stories.

Even Yole Developpement, a market research firm specializing in small tech, can attribute its growth in a large part to Europractice. The 15-person team has grown into a strong European consultancy.

The Europractice team has reacted to this outburst of entrepreneurship and now organizes a venture capital summit each year where selected firms make an “elevator pitch” to potential investors. The newest firms to pass through are exhibiting not just MST and MEMS, but increasingly nanotechnology, too.

Its most recent event was in Frankfurt in December. Participants said the firms are typically at a very early stage and not necessarily fodder for venture capital deal flow. They are much more interesting for angel or corporate venture investors.

“The firms we saw at the summit in December 2003 are at a very early stage where market demand is not yet evident,” said Christian Nagel, managing partner of Earlybird Venture Capital in Hamburg.

Wilkinson says that at least two of the firms that presented at the 2002 summit have found funding. Nanoco Technologies Ltd., with a patented quantum dot production process, and Plasma Antennas were both able to tap incubation funds in their regions to go to the next stage.

Europractice’s focus is now shifting into polymers and glass, microfluidics, biochips or other applications. “The role of nonsilicon (polymer, glass) MST is expanding,” said Roesems. “The market for medical applications is increasing and organizations from Eastern Europe will start playing an active role within Europractice.”

January 6, 2004 – Elbit Vision Systems Ltd., Yoqneam, Israel, a manufacturer of optical inspection equipment, has closed a $2.3 million round of funding, led by new investor Meitav Capital. With the funds, Elbit now meets the Nasdaq exchange’s minimum requirements for shareholder equity, making the company eligible to be relisted on the Nasdaq SmallCap Market.