Category Archives: LEDs

Korean semi exports up


October 10, 2003

October 10, 2003 – South Korean exports rose in September thanks to continued growth in semiconductor exports, according to the Ministry of Commerce, Industry, and Energy.

Exports were $17.22 billion, up from $15.48 billion in August, and well above the previous record of $15.73 billion in April 2003. Semiconductors led the way at $1.82 billion, followed closely by wireless telecom equipment exports at $1.78 billion.

Year-on-year, Korean chip exports have risen steadily in the last four months: 7.9% in June, 15.1% in July, 18.9% in August, and 32.8% in September.

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Oct. 9, 2003 – Quantum dots have been shining light on cell biology for years. Now scientists at Sandia National Laboratories want them to shine on us as an energy-efficient alternative to incandescent and fluorescent lights.

Lauren Rohwer and her colleagues in Albuquerque, N.M., developed encapsulated nanocrystals that can be integrated onto commercially available light-emitting diode (LED) chips to produce white light. Dubbed quantum dots, the nanocrystals absorb invisible light from the LED and emit it as white light.

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“It’s the first demonstration, to our knowledge, of a real solid-state source that uses quantum dots,” said Rohwer, the lead investigator. “White is the biggest accomplishment.”

Quantum dots are nanoscale semiconductor crystals that absorb and emit photons of light at specific light waves, from visible colors into infrared. The size of the dot determines which color, or wavelength, is absorbed. Quantum dots often are used in the life sciences as cellular tags that track biological molecules such as DNA in a cell.

White light is actually a mixture of colors, and getting the right combination using quantum dots is a difficult task. Rowher and her colleagues found that size is not the only method for controlling optical properties, though. They discovered that interactions between the nanocrystal clusters and materials they can be embedded in can affect the color emitted.

But the process of encapsulating quantum dots is tricky. First the group had to devise an inexpensive method for making the nanocrystals at room temperature, and disperse them evenly. An encapsulating polymer was designed as a backbone on which the dots could be attached. Without the polymer, the nanocrystals would clump up and lose their emissive properties.

Quantum dots are an attractive alternative to conventional lighting sources because they are efficient. Nanocrystals are smaller than waves of light, so unlike the much larger phosphors used in conventional lighting, they don’t scatter light waves. Scattering can reduce optical efficiency by as much as 50 percent. 

The Department of Energy estimates that lighting accounts for more than 20 percent of electricity used in the nation. Increased efficiencies could reduce demand, which in turn would lower costs and take some burden off the grid.

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Oct. 8, 2003 – Taking a stake in a nanomaterials maker such as Five Star Technologies Inc. is a little outside the ordinary for venerable venture firm Morgenthaler Ventures. 

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It’s not that Menlo Park, Calif.’s, Morgenthaler doesn’t invest in materials startups. It does. In fact, one of its general partners used to head up the materials lab at Bell Labs.

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Nor is Morgenthaler new to nanotech. It counts NanoOpto among its portfolio companies, and has investments in other varieties of small tech.

It’s just that when Morgenthaler invests in a materials company, the startup is usually already targeted toward a specific application and industry. Take portfolio company Paratek Microwave for example. The Columbia, Md., developer of electronically tunable components and antennas “chose to exploit a material for communications,” said Greg Blonder of Morgenthaler.

“It’s the application that makes the money rather than the material,” he said.

Five Star is expected to announce today that it received $4.5 million in its second institutional round of funding. Led by Morgenthaler, the round also includes the participation of Chevron Technology Ventures, Early Stage Partners, Industrial Technology Ventures and other unnamed investors.

So why would Morgenthaler lead an investment in Five Star, a Cleveland nanomaterials outfit seeking to supply widely disparate sectors? To be, in effect, in the materials business? According to Morgenthaler’s Blonder (who used to head up Bell Labs materials science research division), two things stood out about the company. 

First, Five Star claims that its process is inherently scalable. “That’s the first thing we liked about it,” Blonder said.

Second, the company had already identified a number of markets for its nanomaterials. “These days with all the economic uncertainties, we’ve seen companies fail that had excellent opportunities but the cash ran out before the market appeared.”

There are about 100 companies worldwide providing nanomaterials, according to Thomas Abraham, vice president of research at Business Communications Company Inc. (BCC) , a Norwalk, Conn., research firm that tracks nanomaterials, among other sectors. He said Nanophase, Inframat, NEI and Altair have been among the industry leaders and that the major suppliers tend to be smaller companies.

Five Star is seeking to differentiate itself by focusing on complex oxides — that is, combinations of two, three, four or even more metal oxides in a compound. Such nanomaterials can be custom designed for specific applications. Abraham said that complex oxides represent a relatively small portion of the overall market, but a growing one.

With the recently raised funds, said Five Star president and chief executive Jim Mazzella, the company intends to develop applications in the areas of energy (catalysts), advanced polymers and pharmaceuticals and drug delivery. A core technology team will work with individual business development groups set up to serve each market. Although the company’s primary focus is on developing and selling advanced materials, it will also license the technology to a customer who requires that nanomaterial processing be integrated with other manufacturing infrastructure.

Five Star uses a process called hydrodynamic cavitation — ordinarily a destructive force that occurs naturally in fluid flow — to make nano and micro structured materials. In hydrodynamic cavitation, bubbles within a fluid implode, releasing energy that can amplify a chemical reaction occurring within a reaction chamber. The result, Mazzella said, are smaller and more uniform nanoparticles.

The world market for nanoparticulate materials reached $492.3 million in 2000, according to BCC, which forecasts a market worth $898.8 million in 2005. Abraham said those numbers have not been revised since their publication in 2001. Although he considers them conservative, he cautioned that the growth in nanostructured materials for electronic, magnetic and optoelectronic applications — responsible for $333 million in 2000 and forecast to be worth $667 million in 2005 — will be slower than anticipated due to the economic slowdown.

Nanomaterials have attracted a significant amount of venture interest this year. Catalyst developer Nanox Inc. of Quebec garnered $2.9 million in July. In June, Nanotechnologies Inc. of Austin, Texas, announced an equity investment from and joint development agreement with Air Products and Chemicals Inc. The previous month, Catalytic Solutions Inc. of Oxnard, Calif., closed on $32.4 million in funding, one of the largest nano-related financing rounds so far this year.

Mazzella said he anticipates that there will be another funding round in the future for Five Star, though he declined to speculate when. The company currently has a window open for participation from a few other firms with which it began speaking late in the fundraising process.

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TAUNTON, Mass., Oct. 6, 2003 — John C.C. Fan always likes to have a few dishes cooking at the same time.

 That’s why he divided up the workings of his company, Kopin Corp., into several different product lines. First came low-power transistors for wireless devices; next came miniature display screens for camcorders, cell phones and other handheld devices. Last summer Fan introduced Kopin’s latest entrée: a light-emitting diode that exploits nanotechnology to generate more light with less power.

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One year later, with real revenues now coming through the door, the message is clear: the market has an appetite for what Kopin is selling.

“Suffice to say we’re quite pleased,” says Fan, who remains tight-lipped about precisely what his sales projections are for the LEDs, formally known as the CyberLite. But he will confirm that Kopin has already shipped about 40 million of the chips priced at 10 cents each — a $4 million revenue stream, a respectable bit of change for a company with total 2002 revenues of $76.8 million.

Fan described the initial reception as “very exciting” since many players in the LED industry thought the CyberLite wouldn’t work. Not until Kopin began shipping its product to a paying customer (which Fan won’t identify, although he did say the CyberLites go into cell phone displays) did skeptics take Kopin’s claims on their merits.

“That surprised many people,” he said.

Every LED chip has defects, which disrupt the motion of electrons that create light. Rather than struggle to correct those defects, Fan developed what he calls “nanopocket” technology to exploit them: divots on the chip 50 nanometers across and a few nanometers deep. The nanopockets collect electrons away from the defects, boosting the light output. As a result, Kopin’s CyberLite LEDs run on 2.9 volts to create the same brightness generated by 3.3 volts.

“It was a totally novel approach” to incorporate chip defects into the LED design, Fan said.

The CyberLites themselves are about 300 microns square.
The technology took several years to develop. Fan knew he wanted to make blue-light LEDs on gallium arsenide, and Kopin had a long history of combining gallium arsenide with silicon nitride to make chips. What the company could not do was grow gallium arsenide in the first place — so Kopin purchased Super Epy Inc. in 2000 to acquire that expertise. The combined know-how provided the underpinnings of nanopocket technology.

Fan and many others expect LEDs to displace incandescent bulbs in the next 10 or 20 years. They already appear in some cell phones and other miniature displays. Next up is likely to be the automotive market, which uses an increasing number of LEDs in cars and trucks for indicators or warning lights.

“It’s a very good growth market. We’re very competitive there,” Fan says.

Beyond that, the LED’s path to mainstream use is less clear. Lumileds Lighting Corp. in San Jose makes much larger diodes that use 3.5 to 4 volts, for car headlights or commercial lighting in an office. Company spokeswoman Fran Douros, however, warned that many such applications are still in the prototype stage. For example, she said, Detroit automakers don’t plan to make LEDs standard in headlights until 2007 or so.

“The general purpose use, that’s still a few years away,” she said.
More direct competitors to Kopin include Cree Inc. in Durham, N.C., as well as Nichia Corp. in Japan and several other Asian manufacturers. None use quite the same approach as Kopin, but competition is fierce. In September Cree introduced its XThin LED, which will go after the same cyber-display market as Kopin’s CyberLite.

“The growth right now is in mobile appliances,” company spokeswoman Frances Barsky said.

Both LEDS are 300 microns square, although the XThin uses 3.2 volts rather than CyberLite’s 2.9.

In the future, Fan wants to expand to green LEDs and increase the electrostatic discharge threshold beyond the 1,000 to 2,000 volts CyberLite has now. And for use in households — Fan’s ultimate goal — Kopin will need an LED about three times brighter and 10 times cheaper.

“There’s plenty of work for all our Ph.D.s,” he quips.

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Company file: Kopin Corp.
(last updated Oct. 6, 2003)

Company
Kopin Corporation

Ticker symbol
[NASDAQ: KOPN]

Headquarters
695 Myles Standish Blvd.
Myles Standish Industrial Park
Taunton, MA 02780

History
Founded in late 1984, Kopin went public in a $15 million April 1992 IPO. In 2000, the company purchased Super Epy in order to gain expertise in GaAs development.

Industry
Advanced integrated circuit manufacturing

Employees
385

Small tech-related products and services
Kopin’s LED product, the CyberLite, takes advantage of existing chip defects to increase the brightness output of the LED. The CyberLite is the latest in a stream of Kopin products, including HBT transistor wafers and CyberDisplay miniature displays, to use the company’s proprietary Wafer-Engineering technology.

Management
John C.C. Fan: president, chief executive officer, chairman and founder
Richard Sneider: chief financial officer and treasurer
Hong Choi: vice president and chief technology officer

Investment history
Prior to its IPO, Kopin completed the following funding rounds:

  • April 1995: $1.6 million with selected participants Post Venture Associates, Cardinal Partners, Venrock Associates and Equity Ventures

  • December 1985: $300,000 with Cardinal and Venrock
    – April 1987: $8 million, adding new participants State Farm Insurance, Charles River Ventures, BancBoston Ventures, Eberstadt Fleming

  • December 1992: $2.6 million in a common stock deal with AT&T State Street

Revenues
$76.8 million (2002)

Selected strategic partners and customers

Selected competitors

Barriers to market
While its CyberLite revenues are helping offset HBT transistor losses in a weak handset market, it is likely that Kopin will have to wait several years before the automobile industry adopts LEDs as a standard. While fending off Cree’s competitive LED product, the company will also need to put its energies toward development of a higher-power, less expensive LED for household use.

Relevant patents
High density electronic circuit modules
Three dimensional processor using transferred thin film circuits

Contact
URL: http://www.kopin.com/
Tel: 508-824-6696
Fax: 508-824-6958
Email: [email protected]

– Research by Gretchen McNeely

 

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Oct. 3, 2002 — Tom Cellucci has a very simple job description.

“He’s going to start bringing money in,” said his new boss, Jim Von Ehr, chief executive of Dallas-based Zyvex Corp.

Over the past year, Von Ehr has been shifting the company’s focus from the distant possibilities of molecular manufacturing to the practical realities of cash flow. Cellucci was brought in more than a month ago as chief marketing officer and vice president of products. And since then the company has hammered out five-year marketing and business plans while transitioning the company from a “technology push to a market pull.”

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Cellucci, who until recently was president and chief executive of Etec Inc., a MEMS company in West Peabody, Mass., is now busily hawking the hardware and software Zyvex has developed to others in the MEMS and nanotech field. The marketing chief is also pursuing plans to license some of the company’s intellectual products while another worker is devoting time to winning new grants.

“The culture at the company is changing,” Cellucci said. “The fact is we have made it clear within the company that we need to focus at least 80 percent of our efforts on more shorter-term goals that are more application specific while we maintain long-term research.”

None of that called for any layoffs, Cellucci said, but it did require him to take a few extra weeks to explain the process internally and get the company’s 54-member workforce to buy in to the new approach.

Coming up with a marketing plan for a nanotech company is no easy task, said Cellucci, who holds a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from Rutgers University. “We can’t find a marketing report or go on the Web and find data on the nanotech industry,” he said. So he ended up culling through “literally thousands of pieces of data to form the basis of a strategic marketing plan.”

Cellucci said Zyvex is out to market its nano-manipulators as the company’s “first family of products.” The company also is looking to generate revenue by licensing its IP on carbon nanotube processing, a field where it already has scores of patents pending.

“I think it’s a wise strategy,” said Josh Wolfe, managing partner of Lux Capital. “Jim (Von Ehr)’s shown an ability to morph quickly. I think they’ve been very quick to shift toward those pockets of opportunity that have the highest probability of success.”

A recent move by Zyvex toward MEMS led them into a field that quickly became saturated, Wolfe said. By shifting again into capitalizing on the tools they’ve designed, the company not only starts making cash, but also strikes up new relationships that could potentially create profitable joint ventures.

“And,” Wolfe added, “I think it’s a great way to lower some of the burn rate.”

The shift marks a big change for Von Ehr, who has regaled listeners over the years with his dreams of molecular manufacturing, in which virtually anything may one day be constructed from the tiniest building blocks. These days, Von Ehr and most others in his company are much more focused on the task of assembling an income stream.

“A lot of this stuff you read in the trade journals about nanorobots doing this and that; while it’s worthwhile to discuss, we’re focusing on tools and research while at the same time keeping an eye on longer-term applications,” Cellucci said.

Cellucci defines long-term as eight years and beyond, a horizon that the company still has in its sights. Zyvex was given a matching $12.5 million grant from the National Institute of Science and Technology’s Advanced Technology Program to fund research aimed at creating prototype microscale assemblers and then bringing them down to nanoscale.

Zyvex originally set out on the program paired with Standard MEMS. But that company was recently forced out by financial turmoil. Von Ehr said that Honeywell officially took Standard MEMS’ place in the program and Zyvex has been working with Honeywell’s MEMS foundry near Seattle.

“The parts we’ve been getting back have been good quality parts,” said Von Ehr, visibly relieved at getting the program back on track.

September 25, 2003 – Taiwan’s Nichia Corp. has won a patent dispute against rival Epistar Corp. concerning blue LED technology. A victory by Epistar could have sparked a price war, impacting Cree Inc., Durham, NH, which holds a cross-licensing deal with Nichia.

Oct. 2, 2003 — Japanese chemical manufacturing firm Showa Denko KK (SDK) and an engineering professor at Japan’s Shinshu University have established a joint venture for research of advanced carbon materials for use in energy devices, according to news release.

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Shinshu engineering professor Morinobu Endo serves as chief technology officer of MEFS Co. Ltd. Its chief executive is Toyoharu Fujii, director and executive officer of SDK’s inorganic materials sector.

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In 1982, Endo and SDK started joint research into vapor-grown carbon fiber, a multiwall carbon nanotube. The efforts promoted the use of the fiber as a high-performance additive in lithium-ion batteries, and led to volume production. SDK now produces 40 tons of carbon nanofiber annually, the release said.

GE unveils Humilab


October 1, 2003

SEPT. 30–WILMINGTON, Mass.–GE General Eastern Instruments, Inc. a business unit of GE Industrial Systems and the General Electric Company has announced the availability of the Humilab product line, a NIST traceable humidity generator and chamber ideal for calibrating a wide variety of humidity sensors, transmitters and instruments.

The new Humilab provides the ability to verify, calibrate and document humidity sensors used in applications in aerospace, automotive, pharmaceutical, electronic, plastics, chemical and food processing and storage and HVAC building automation controls. The Humilab utilizes the time-proportioned divided-flow technique developed by GE to achieve relative humidity stability of 0.2% RH. A built-in chilled mirror hygrometer continuously measures the test environment and provides feedback to the Humilab’s microprocessor controller.

The chilled mirror is a primary humidity instrument that controls a polished rhodium mirror surface to a thermal and mass equilibrium between dew formation and evaporation. A precision level of control is achieved by using infrared optics to control thermoelectric cooling and heating. The temperature of the mirror is measured with a precise platinum RTD and the resulting temperature is by definition the dew point. A second platinum RTD measures dry bulb temperature. Relative Humidity is computed from these fundamental measurements.

The Humilab provides accuracy of +/-1.5% from 10-80% RH and +/-2% from 80-90% RH. The test chamber measures 644 cubic inches (10.6 L) in volume enabling several humidity instruments to be calibrated simultaneously with out sacrificing portability. The test chamber is constructed of stainless steel and is equipped with an onboard desiccant dryer and saturator.

The Humilab is equipped with fittings to connect a water bath/circulator for standardized temperature control and for dry compressed air. Bright LED displays indicate the set point, %RH and temperature. Analog (4-20mA & 0-5VDC) signals and a digital interface (RS-232) enable the chamber

September 22, 2003 – RFco Inc., a Los Gatos, CA, fabless semiconductor company, has closed a $16.5 million Series A round of funding, led by a trio of venture capital firms. RFco, whose management team has common experience at AMD, is developing a new class of wireless chips.

eSilicon secures funding


September 22, 2003

September 19, 2003 – eSilicon Corp., Sunnyvale, CA, has secured $21 million in series E funding, led by Crescendo Ventures and RWI Group, which will be used to expand production capabilities and support new service offerings. The custom-chip manufacturer has raised $71 million in funding to date.