Category Archives: LEDs

BridgeWave nets $4.75 million


September 30, 2002

Sept. 30, 2002 — BridgeWave Communications Inc., a Santa Clara, Calif.-based developer of high-speed semiconductor interconnects and packaging, has received $4.75 million in fourth round financing, according to Gregg Levin, senior vice president of marketing and business development.

The round was led by new investor West STEAG Partners. Previous investors Jerusalem Venture Partners and MKS Ventures also participated.

Levin said the majority of the funding will go toward commercializing interconnect and packaging products made with micromachining processes, to be conducted in its BridgeWave Technologies business unit. The company also develops products for fixed wireless Internet access.

“We’re really using this additional money to build up the team [and] get prototype technology that’s been developed to be released as a product,” Levin said. He said the company intends to make product announcements in the first quarter of next year and anticipates seeking further financing when it is ready to launch a manufacturing effort.

BridgeWave, founded in December, 1998, currently employs 25 people. Funding prior to the current round totaled $40 million.

Sept. 25, 2002 — Aviva Biosciences Corp., a San Diego biochip company focused on cellular screening and analysis, announced second round financing of $11.8 million. The round was led by existing investor China Development Industrial Bank, according to Eric Lachenmeier, director of business development. New investors include Axon Instruments Inc. and Pac-Link Management Corp. Other unnamed previous and new investors also participated.

The 18-person company, founded in 1999, previously received $5 million in first round financing. In April of this year, it received $3 million in bridge financing, which was subsequently included in the $11.8 million second round.

Lachenmeier said the company is currently ramping up production capabilities to deliver cartridges for Axon’s PatchXpress 7000A line of drug screening systems. He said the company will take at least a year before it seeks more funding.

Sept. 23, 2002 – Santa Clara, CA – Nine individuals have filed a $25 million suit in Santa Clara County California Superior Court against SUMCO Oregon Corp., a company formed from Mitsubishi Silicon America (MSA), Mitsubishi Materials Corp. (MMC), Sumitomo Metals Industries (SMI), Sumitomo Mitsubishi Silicon Corp. (SMSC), and SUMCO USA Corp.

The plaintiffs assert that the defendants have denied them benefits owed as a result of the recent merger of the silicon wafer businesses of Mitsubishi and Sumitomo in February.

The merger allegedly resulted in the reorganization of SUMCO Oregon and the termination of most of its US-based executive team, including many of the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs believe these actions are an inexcusable breach of commitment and are the culmination of a long-standing plan and effort to deny their benefits.

The suit filed by nine previous SUMCO Oregon senior executives and led by former SUMCO Oregon Chairman and CEO Chet Brauch, charges the defendants with eight claims, including breach of contract for defaulting on their long-term incentive plan (LTIP). (The LTIP is a deferred compensation vehicle provided to participating executives and was used by the defendant primarily as a recruiting and retention tool to compete with compensation programs for senior executives by American companies. The plan was created in 1999 by a consulting firm that specializes in executive compensation plans at the request of MMC and SUMCO Oregon.)

The plaintiffs asserted that their former employer, SUMCO Oregon, took action designed to defeat the LTIP without the participation of Chet Brauch, MSA chairman, CEO, and head of the compensation committee. Additionally, the plaintiffs claim that the Japanese dominated board of directors presented an amended LTIP at their board of directors meeting just prior to the merger without proper pre-review and agenda notification of US directors and “railroaded” through a vote. Finally, the plaintiffs claim that Mitsubishi and Sumitomo conspired to deny the promised benefits and implemented a reorganization that strips out the value of Sumco Oregon.

The filing resulted from the defendants’ unwillingness to acknowledge change of control for purposes of the LTIP.

A merger in February 2002 between MMC and SMI, coupled with company reorganization and executive management changes, triggered the LTIP’s accelerated vesting and payout for SUMCO Oregon participants. SUMCO USA restructured SUMCO Oregon’s 10-member executive staff by terminating five of seven of its US participants while three Japanese ex-pats were transferred to executive positions within the US, according to the plaintiffs.

Chet Brauch, former chairman and CEO of SUMCO Oregon, stated “We are extremely disappointed that the defendants have not seen fit to honor their contract with us. We all have worked diligently over the past three years to create a leadership position for SUMCO Oregon in the silicon industry. Our incentives were tied to performance and we feel that we have done an outstanding job of creating sales revenue increases for SUMCO Oregon of 67% over the 1998 – 2000 period when the market grew 38%. In our opinion, actions have been taken by SUMCO Oregon in order to deny the plan participants the benefits they were originally promised under the long term incentive plan.”

Sept. 23, 2002 — Agile Materials & Technologies, a Goleta, Calif., developer of variable integrated passive components for radio frequency — or wireless — electronics, announced it has secured $5.8 million so far in first round funding, according to Chuck Bischof, chief executive. He said the round is still open for another $2 million to $3 million and will close toward the end of October.

NextGen Partners led the round. Additional investors include CyCad Group, Harris & Harris Group Inc. and Rockport Partners.

Bischof said the round was oversubscribed and that the original target was between $3 million and $3.5 million. “As the economy started deteriorating,” he said, “we felt it would be smart to get more money at this time.” He said he anticipates the funding should last well into 2004. Goals include expanding the company’s infrastructure, buying equipment for validation and production and hiring additional personnel.

A spinoff of the University of California, Santa Barbara, Agile Materials & Technologies was founded in 1999. It previously received $1.25 million in funding from SBIR grants. Bischof said the company has almost 10 employees and he expects to have 18 by year’s end. He said the company is working on projects with a defense contractor and “a couple of major device manufacturers in the cellular phone industry.”

Sept. 23, 2002 — Strand Genomics Pvt Ltd, a Bangalore, India, developer of software for microarray data analysis and other biotechnology applications, has received $4.6 million in a first round of funding, according to a news release. WestBridge Capital Partners led the round. UTI Ventures and other unnamed investors also participated.

Strand was founded by a group of computer scientists from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. The company’s goal is to accelerate drug discovery and development.

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Sept. 20, 2002 — Philips, like GE, Intel, IBM and Samsung, is a large company that has adopted a small tech R&D program because it sees huge market potential. But Philips is mixing in a healthy dose of skepticism as it prepares small tech-enabled products for market.

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“We are not working on small tech because everybody else is,” explained Koen Joosse, a Philips spokesman. “We are carefully assessing the most promising technologies and only if they prove to be technically feasible, cost effective and give better performance, will we go ahead and use them.”

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Philips, one of Europe’s largest electronics companies with sales of $32 billion in 2001, is active in the areas of lighting, consumer electronics, domestic appliances, components, semiconductors and medical systems. Among its key products are color television sets, lights, electric shavers, medical diagnostic imaging and patient monitoring systems.

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Philips is mainly interested in high-volume markets, where fabrication costs are critical. So if a technology does not allow cost-effective mass production with sufficiently high yields, Philips cannot afford to use it.

An example of Philips’ successful use of small tech in commercial products is the company’s polymer organic light-emitting diode — or PolyLED — display. The company recently introduced the first monochrome PolyLED display in its latest men’s shaver. This is the first version of a range of future products that will incorporate the screens in computer notebooks, ultrathin TVs and ultimately even flexible displays.

The company is now preparing mass production of a full-color passive matrix display that will be launched at the end of next year. According to Martin Fleuster, development manager for PolyLED, these displays are targeted at small-screen devices such as mobile phones and MP3 players.

“I cannot give exact sales figures, but with our current pilot line for monochrome screens, we ship about 200,000 displays that sell for somewhere around $20 this year and expect to triple the volume next year. Since the market, which is 90 percent telecom, turns to full color screens fast, we intend to start up mass fabrication of our full-color display instead of the monochrome one,” Fleuster said.

“Philips worked closely together with CDT (Cambridge Display Technology) to develop the basic idea into a manufacturable technology suited for high-volume production, said Eliav Haskal, project leader of PolyLED research. “While CDT is mainly interested in selling intellectual property, we are focused on bringing this technology to market as soon as possible” using the company’s large facilities, extensive distribution network and financial resources needed to introduce any new technology.

“Our strategy is to work with companies that can help us achieve this goal, such as CDT and Litrex Corp., with whom we co-developed the required inkjet printing technology.”

Philips uses inkjet technology for definition of the color pixels. Each pixel is about 60 microns wide and the final polymer layer thickness is only 70 nanometers. To achieve these dimensions, a special piezoceramic-based inkjet head deposits liquid polymer droplets with a volume as low as 0.02 nanoliters with an inaccuracy of less than 5 percent.

“There are two basic technologies,” said Andrew Murray, senior analyst at iSuppli/Stanford Resources, a market and technology research firm that specializes in the electronic display industry. “Eastman Kodak invented an OLED that is based on vacuum deposition of small organic molecules. Approximately two years later CDT invented the polymer OLED. Companies like Pioneer, Samsung and Philips license the core patents from Kodak and CDT to develop marketable products.”

At the moment, it’s still too early to decide which technology will ultimately win. “The polymer OLED technology has the advantage of lower manufacturing costs due to a simpler process, but it still remains to be proven that it works in high-volume production,” Murray said.

Gerjan van de Walle, leader of the Integrated Device Technologies group at Philips Research, said the company is looking at other small tech applications, including radio frequency (RF) MEMS in next generation wireless applications.

“Integration could, theoretically, result in cheaper solutions,” van de Walle said. “We are currently evaluating the benefits of integrating RF components together with analog and digital electronics on one chip in practice and we still expect some obstacles ahead. Perhaps the technology proves to be more suitable for lower volume niche markets. Again, we’re not into MEMS just because it sounds good; there has to be a real benefit in using this technology.”

Another small technology Philips is investigating is use of carbon nanotubes for displays — also an area the company is approaching with skepticism.

“We have a research group that investigates this application,” van de Walle said. “It is just one of many competing flat display technologies. We are not entirely convinced that carbon nanotube displays will be the most successful, even though some companies are already anticipating its breakthrough on the market.”

Murray agrees: “Research is still in its very early days. There are not a lot of display companies that seriously look into this application of carbon nanotubes,” he said.

“Sometimes, press releases on possible market introduction should be regarded more as PR or fund-raising activity than anything else.”

Sept. 19, 2002 — Cellomics Inc., a Pittsburgh developer of microarrays and other life science tools, announced $20 million in fifth-round financing composed of $15 million in current funding and $5 million of bridge financing from February that had not been previously announced.

Carl Zeiss Jena GmbH led the round. Additional investors include Oxford Bioscience Partners, InterWest Partners, Vector Fund, Alta Partners and Axiom Ventures. All were previous investors in the company.

Cellomics has raised $75 million in venture funding to date. A company spokesman said the company’s goal with current financing is to reach profitability and that it is does not now anticipate further financing.

Sept. 19, 2002 — Ceramic materials — hard, strong and highly resistant to wear — are a desirable alternative to conventional materials in a wide variety of industrial applications. Yet, as anyone who has ever dropped a plate or mug knows, such hardness and strength comes at the expense of brittleness — not a very positive characteristic if you’re talking about a military application.

Enter the realm of nanostructured coatings. Since 1997, dozens of scientists have labored to create a nanostructured coating that is highly resistant to wear, erosion and corrosion and would be ductile enough for applications in which conventional ceramic coatings would fail.

The scientists, hailing from more than 20 organizations — military, academic and commercial — were led by Maurice Gell of the materials engineering department at the University of Connecticut. The effort is the brainchild of U.S. Navy visionaries who identified an opportunity to reduce life cycle costs and improve the maintainability of ships and their components.

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This combined effort culminated in the development, production and application of a nanoceramic composite coating made from alumina and titania, which Inframat Corp. — a privately held nanotechnology company founded in 1996 and based in Farmington, Conn., — now manufactures under the trade name Nanox 2613.

But Nanox is expensive. At an estimated $30 to $50 per pound, it can cost significantly more than competing products. According to Lawrence Kabacoff with the Office of Naval Research, who has been administering the research effort since its inception, in the short term “inroads into the civilian market generally have to be with people who have acute problems.” Such applications can be found mainly in environments that are especially aggressive in terms of wear or corrosion.

Conventional coatings are produced from particles that range from 0.1 to 1.0 microns in size. Such particles conduct heat well, completely melting during application and forming a homogeneous ceramic surface that is highly susceptible to cracking.

Nanostructured materials, with grain sizes smaller than 100 nanometers, do not conduct heat as well. As a result, when a nanostructured coating is sprayed on a substrate, the smaller grains do not all melt. This allows for the creation of a matrix that consists of large, pancake-like structures embedded in a weave of spherical nanoparticles. This microstructure allows the material to trap cracks rather than letting them propagate, key to the coating’s superior ductility and strength.

According to Gell, the alumina/titania nanoceramic exhibits a four- to six-fold improvement in wear, and a two-fold improvement in factor toughness and bond strength when compared to the conventional ceramic alternative.

The U.S. Navy is already using the nanostructured coating for a number of applications. For example, air intake and exhaust valves in submarines have been coated, saving $400,000 per ship — or an estimated $20 million over the next 10 years. Coating propulsion shafts on mine sweepers will result in a $1 million annual savings per ship. And naval engineers at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Carderock, Md., have thus far managed to transition coatings for five other major vessel components, an effort estimated to result in an annual maintenance savings of $10 million.

Commercial applications abound, according to Kabacoff. “If you do something good for a pump on an aircraft carrier, then it’s good for any similar pump in the civilian world,” he said.

Nanox is being evaluated as a potential coating for ballast tanks, periscope shafts, valves and a variety of machinery components submersed in marine environments.

One mining company that leaches nickel and cobalt from low-grade ore has been testing Nanox coated ball valves. Such valves have to withstand a high-pressure slurry of crushed rock in an extremely acidic environment. Conventional valves last a few hours between refurbishings, but coated valves can survive for a couple of days.

In the automotive industry, the nanostructured coating is being tested for potential application to mufflers and exhaust manifolds. Oil and gas companies are evaluating it for use on screw pump rotors in commercial gas turbines and fuel feed pumps. And experts speak of numerous other applications in the printing, pulp and paper industries.

Inframat can now ship Nanox by the ton. John Burdick, Inframat’s executive vice president for corporate development would not say which companies are evaluating Inframat’s thermal spray coatings for use in their products, but he did say they were “household names and names you would know as Fortune 500 companies.” The company’s largest order to date has been for 1,000 pounds, an indication that customers are beginning to use the material for more than just experimental applications.

Sept. 16, 2002 — Nanomix Inc., an Emeryville, Calif., developer of nanotech-enabled chemical sensors and hydrogen storage technologies, has raised $9 million in second round funding, according to Charles Janac, president and chief executive officer. New investors Apax Partners and Sevin Rosen Funds led the round. New investor Enertech Capital Partners and previous investors Alta Partners and Goran Lindahl also participated, in addition to unnamed individual investors.

Janac said the company’s goal is to ship chemical sensors by the end of 2003. It is currently focused on overcoming the technical hurdles inherent in combining its sensors with silicon wafers in a manner compatible with volume production methods.

“We’re looking to integrate nanotubes and CMOS in a way that’s reproducible in hundreds of thousands of units,” Janac said. Initial customers are expected to be in industrial safety and monitoring.

The company’s hydrogen storage initiative — targeted at fuel cells for automobiles and portable electronics — is not as far along. Janac said the company is currently doing lab-scale prototyping.

By Debra Vogler
WaferNews Technical Editor

“Another major initiative is getting a common highway to the customer base,” says Zafiropoulo. “Especially since utilization in factories is typically less than 50%. We need to find a better way to get data from machines to people with security.”

Zafiropoulo describes a possible approach as a kind of pay-as-you-go service similar to a phone line – one accessible to any SEMI member. “Other information such as technical data, marketing information, updates, etc., could also be transmitted rapidly and ultimately improve access to information, increasing factory utilization and feedback.”

If this year’s SEMICON West was any indication, the ATE sector of the industry appears to have a proliferation of standards and open architecture activities with no end in sight – Zafiropoulo has his work cut out for him. Toshio Maruyama, president and COO of Advantest Corp., and Nicholas Konidaris, president and CEO of Advantest America, chaired a press conference introducing the Semiconductor Test Consortium.

The consortium, open to all in the semiconductor industry with a vested interest in the test sector, seeks to simplify and reduce the cost of testing complex logic devices. A list of members was not disclosed but representatives of Intel and Wavecrest participated in the announcement. Konidaris characterized the activity by noting, “You can have a bold move by a major supplier and a major customer, or you can wait longer for a standard.” Intel attendees noted that the IC manufacturer wants a common infrastructure – they don’t believe the current situation in the industry is workable. The white paper upon which the consortium is based was authored by Intel and covers general attributes and capabilities for ATE platforms including flexibility, modularity, scalability, efficiency, and the computing environment.

Even before SEMICON West, Teradyne announced its open architecture initiative, which is used in its Integra FLEX test system. According to Mark Kohalmy, business development manager of the initiative, the idea is to enable a broader array of third party instrumentation suppliers the ability to provide instruments that work with Teradyne’s platform. But an open architecture isn’t the same as a standard, cautions Kohalmy, and likened the activity in the ATE sector to the beginnings of the Internet.

Noting that Teradyne has almost 40% of the market share for SoC testers, Kohalmy believes that is one reason the company will be successful in its open architecture strategy. In this respect, the situation may be similar to that concerning Applied Materials, which has such a large market share that it has led to a number of communications protocols becoming de facto standards.

Other reasons Kohalmy gave for believing in Teradyne’s open architecture: “It’s available now and we’ve already shown that it can be used by disparate design teams. Teradyne has development centers worldwide so we needed a standard interface. FLEX was designed to have an open architecture.”

Agilent’s Tom Newsom, VP and GM of the SoC business unit, says the company is a big believer in standards and supports the major ones already in use. So far, the company is not a part of a specific open architecture, preferring to stick with its 93000 SoC tester strategy. When asked how anyone could ignore the fact that Intel is working with Advantest on its Semiconductor Test Consortium, Newsom acknowledges that no one can ignore Intel, but he frames the issue around the question, “What does Intel want?”

“It wants fewer platforms with longer life and more capabilities on a single platform,” he answers.

He offered that Intel most likely believes in an open architecture because it worked for the PC industry.

Newsom brought up the ATE industry’s experience with the VXI standard as a learning experience. Based on the VME architecture, VXI is a backplane interface standard driven by the military. According to Newsom, although the original thought was that a standard open architecture would result in less costly cards, that was not the case.

“A lot of overhead was designed into the instrumentation cards, making them more expensive because you never really know what card would be next to what [in the test rack],” he explains.

Asked to comment on VXI, Kolhamy explains that, because of its military application – testing at avionics maintenance depots – the test volume was very low and throughput was not a requirement. The semiconductor industry has a large test volume and requires high throughout.

“The requirement for VXI was one of complexity, not throughput,” states Kolhamy.

NPTest, the wholly owned subsidiary of Schlumberger Ltd., has also been working on a strategy – the company will have more to say at the International Test Conference in October, according to Burnie West, technical advisor to the company.

Regarding the open architecture efforts currently being undertaken in the industry, West states that obtaining an open architecture is a complex undertaking with respect to the high volume test arena and thinks one question should be asked: “Did you think about these things [e.g., plug ‘n’ play instrumentation, massively multi-site test execution, consistent high-speed system communication] within the context of enabling effective participation without extensive collaboration with the platform owner?”

Explaining the difference between a standard and open architecture, West states, “If an architecture is sufficiently open and accessible and technically sound, it can become a de facto standard.” He further made a distinction between standards that become barriers vs. those that promote innovation.

“If a standard gets adopted too early, it tends to stifle innovation,” explaines West. “A standard promotes innovation if it’s a platform that innovators can stand upon instead of a barrier that they have to punch through.”

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