Oct. 28, 2002 — Konarka Technologies Inc., a Lowell, Mass., developer of nanoparticle-based photovoltaic energy generation products, has received $13.5 million in second round financing, according to Paul Wormser, chief operating officer.

Draper Fisher Jurvetson led the round. Zero Stage Capital, Ardesta LLC and NextGen Partners also participated. Ardesta is the parent company of Small Times Media.

Zero Stage led Konarka’s first round financing in 2001, which included individual investors and the University of Massachusetts, according to Wormser, who said total funding to date is approximately $14.5 million.

The company intends to use the funding to open a pilot manufacturing line and continue product development, Wormser said. Founded in June, 2001, the 25-person company will seek to raise a third round of financing in 2004.

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Oct. 25, 2002 — Made using thin, nanostructured polymer films, organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) are making a big noise in small tech-based displays, but Cleveland-based Viztec Inc. is putting nanotech to work in older, liquid crystal displays that work with existing LCD manufacturing and systems.

While LCDs have been made for more than 30 years, Viztec says its Plastic Pixels technology — a phase separation process using submicron particle coatings — can leverage small tech to keep LCDs big for years to come.

“They’re claiming some good cost benefits,” Gartner Dataquest analyst Jim Walker said. “This would extend LCD technology. It keeps it going. People find ways of extending technology and it looks like they’ve found another one.”

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Viztec envisions its tough, plastic LCD technology in mobile phones and other handsets, wearable devices, toys and military electronics where displays must be thin, light and durable. However, these are the same applications that have generated excitement over OLEDs — glowing plastic molecules made of thin, nanostructured polymer films.

“We think OLEDs are going to be very competitive in mobile phone displays,” said Barry Young of DisplaySearch, a market research and consulting company for the display industry.

While he said OLEDs are already common in some phone displays and will likely spread to PDAs and camcorders, Young said OLEDs are still serving mostly niche applications in small displays such as games and mobile phones.

LCDs, on the other hand, are already produced to the tune of one billion displays a year — used in watches, cell phones, PDAs, laptops and more.

Viztec, which won a $1 million grant from Ohio’s Technology Action Fund earlier this year, boasts that because its technology is compatible with existing LCD manufacturing and drive circuitry — making plastic LCDs “drop-in replacements for traditional glass displays” — the market is hungry for its Plastic Pixels.

“Our technology is agnostic as to what you put in it — that’s been the trick,” said Steve Sundberg, Viztec vice president of sales and marketing. “Being able to control the interaction of molecules in these systems down to submicron accurate is something we’ve created.”

Sundberg cited glass LCD production capacity in Asia as a resource for Viztec, adding that the liquid, drives and processes are all compatible with the company’s technology. “I think we’ve got a cost advantage for a long time,” he said. “We’re able to go in and not upset the existing infrastructure. Market interest in this has been very, very strong.”

Unlike glass-based liquid crystal displays, Viztec’s LCDs are bendable, flexible, lightweight, and comparable in actual display qualities to OLEDs, according to Sundberg.

“We’ve been able to take polymer nanocomposites with submicron features and incorporate them into our process,” he said. “We’re able to bend these substrates, which hasn’t been possible before.”

To prove its technology, which Chief Technology Officer Gary Freeman said is also thin and light enough for smart cards, Viztec recently began work in a new 2,500-square-foot clean room facility to accelerate commercialization. The company’s technology was developed through collaboration with Kent State University’s Liquid Crystal Institute.

Sundberg said that while the clean room is not meant for mass production, it will allow Viztec to run multiple experiments to “demonstrate repeated reliability.”

“What this will be is a stepping stone,” Freeman said. “It will be a starting point to line up manufacturers.”

Still, experts say the future is brightest for OLEDs, which offer flexibility, as well as other advantages such as brightness.

“Enough big strides have been made in developing OLEDs that their introduction seems almost within grasp,” said Leo O’Connor, director of research for Technical Insights. “They would be inexpensive, very bright, flexible and durable.”

OLEDs are not without their issues, however, and O’Connor said their developers must still overcome technical challenges such as degradation — the length of time it takes until the displays begin to lose brightness.

Viztec’s Sundberg, who faults OLEDs for power consumption 100 times that of current liquid crystal displays, said he believes both technologies will have their place. “I think OLEDs and LCDs are going to coexist for a long time into the future,” he said.

Sundberg, who said that funding is Viztec’s biggest challenge now, said the cost of a display based on Plastic Pixel technology would cost less than 25 percent more than a traditional, glass-based LCD.

“I think it’s going to be a long time before OLEDs can get into that range,” he said.

O’Connor said Viztec’s claims of ease of fabrication, ruggedness, reduced complexity and fast switching all bode well for the success of its technology, suggesting improved performance and reduced costs.

“Because the developers have invested in a 2,500-square-foot clean room, they are obviously confident in their ability to accelerate commercialization of their technology,” O’Connor said.

Oct. 17, 2002 — Akustica Inc., a Pittsburgh-based developer of acoustic system-on-chip components for wireless and consumer electronics products, announced $2.25 million in first-round financing, according to Jim Rock, the company’s president and chief executive.

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The round was led by Chamberlain Investments, a new venture investing firm formed by Glen Meakem, co-founder of FreeMarkets.com who has taken a seat on Akustica’s board. Chamberlain invested $1.25 million, in addition to $1 million of angel funding that was converted from debt to equity with the current round, according to Rock.

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The company will use the current financing to launch products. “We’re smack dab in the middle of product development,” Rock said, adding that Akustica intends to begin sampling products within the next two months.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 9, 2002 — The chemical industry, government and academia are working together to leverage the expertise of chemical manufacturers for the good of nanotechnology.

At the request of the National Nanotechnology Initiative, a chemical-industry coalition organized a three-day meeting near Washington early this month aimed at putting together a “roadmap” to guide the industry as it gets involved with nano.

The participation of the chemical industry is “absolutely essential” because the industry has broad experience in manufacturing small-scale products, said James Murday, director of the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office.

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“They can bring a wealth of knowledge and accelerate the rate at which we can” use nanotechnology to bring about a “second industrial revolution,” Murday said. As nano R&D matures, he said, some of the biggest obstacles preventing the science’s movement out of the lab and into to the factory are related to difficult manufacturing puzzles. The chemical industry, he said, could more than any other industry help solve manufacturing problems.

From the NNI’s perspective, the point of the meeting was to get the chemical industry organized enough to help determine where investment money — federal and other — should be spent.

“We are not going to dominate the world” in nanotechnology research, he said. “We are 25 percent of the investment in this area. We have to invest smart.”

The meeting was organized by the Chemical Industry Vision 2020 Technology Partnership, a roughly six-year-old coalition of large chemical companies like DuPont, Dow Chemical Co., and Rohm and Haas. The group has cobbled together industry strategies in a variety of different fields. More than 143 companies, 70 universities, 12 national laboratories, 10 government agencies and five professional organizations participated in these “roadmap” collaborations.

Jack Solomon, director of technology planning at the Danbury, Conn., chemical company Praxair Inc., said the meeting was important to help “figure out where to go in nanotechnology.”

“This will help decide where the research and development investments are made,” he said. “It’s getting everybody marching in the same direction.”

The nearly 100 industry representatives who attended the meeting broke up into smaller groups on the first day. Each group spent the next three days wrestling with issues surrounding a particular topic.

The group dedicated to assimilation and modeling concluded that researchers should try to “link nanoscale properties across time and length scales, to specific macroscopic properties,” said Rajeev Gorowara, an engineer at DuPont Engineering and Technology.

To that end, the group recommended that the federal government create a National Center for Nanoscale Modeling, as well as a national data and model repository, containing common taxonomies, links to experimentalists and modelers and an easily searchable database.

Representing the manufacturing group, Frank Lipiecki of Rohm and Haas said nanotechnology companies “don’t have to start from scratch, because a manufacturing model exists” in the chemical industry.

Like most of the group representatives, Lipiecki said the chemical industry must pay close attention to the potential health and environmental problems that could result from the dispersion of nanoparticles.

“We really feel some risk here,” he said. “We are attuned to what happened to the biological engineering of agricultural foodstuffs. It poses a risk to this entire area.”

A key recommendation of his group, in fact, was to get involved early in shaping public opinion about nanotechnology, which would involve paying for studies to examine the health, safety and environmental affects of nanoparticles.

Catherine Hunt of Rohm and Haas, speaking for the characterization group, said the field is desperate for new tools, an opinion shared by many nanotech researchers. The chemical industry could help fill the niche, she said.

Government assistance, she said, is important. Hunt said her group concluded that funding for nanocharacterization should be about $100 million.

“We see analytical tools as a bridge to the nanoscale and back again,” she said. “We want to peer into the nano world, and do it better, faster and cheaper. We want to take tools (used by the national laboratories) and make them available to industry, and we want to turn them into sensors for these new materials.”

Paul O’Connor of Dow Chemical stressed the need for the industry to engage with the government much more about nanotechnology. Among other things, his “dispersions and nanocomposites” group recommended that the industry communicate with the government through new workshops, symposiums and organizations at an “order of magnitude” greater than the current level of interaction.

“We went around the room and asked who is benefiting from government involvement,” he said, “and the answer was ‘very little.'”

Oct. 9, 2002 — Beeline Technologies Pty Ltd., a privately-held Brisbane, Australia, developer of steering assist systems for self-propelled agricultural equipment, has raised $11.2 million in a third round of venture financing, according to a company spokeswoman.

GE Equity led the round. Existing investors Food & Agribusiness Investment Fund, ABN Amro Capital and Queensland Development Fund also participated, as did company management. Beeline previously received approximately $8 million in its first two funding rounds.

The company said it will use the funds to expand in the United States and Australia and to launch marketing programs in Europe. A news release said Beeline’s steering assist technology, which uses MEMS-based components from Crossbow Technology Inc., can steer agricultural equipment to within 0.8 inches accuracy. Benefits include fuel savings and productivity improvements.

Beeline was founded in 1994 and has 68 employees in Australia and 25 in the United States. In July, the company signed a contract to supply steering assist units to agricultural equipment vendor AGCO Corp.

Sept. 30, 2002 — Cube Optics AG, a Mainz, Germany-based provider of fiber optic components, has secured $9.9 million in first round financing, according to Sven Kruger, manager of marketing and communications.

The round was led by new investors The Carlyle Group and Target Partners. Previous investors STAR Ventures and Sevin Rosen Funds also participated.

The 20-person company, founded in August 2000, previously received seed financing in October 2000. Kruger said via e-mail that the current financing will be to “spend on R&D to extend our product range as well as on marketing and sales for gaining further market traction.” He said the company is now funded until at least 2005.

Sept. 30, 2002 — Nanolayers Ltd., a Jerusalem-based developer of organic thin-film technologies for enhancing microelectronic components, has closed a round of seed financing for an undisclosed amount, according to a news release.

The round was led by the Millennium Materials Technologies Fund. Intel Capital and angel group Summit Technology also participated.

Nanolayers was formed in 2001 by Yissum, the technology transfer company of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.