Category Archives: LEDs

May 7, 2002 — Ithaca, N.Y.’s Advion BioSciences Inc. announced today the placement of more than $15 million in Series B preferred shares.

The investment round was led by Skyline Ventures and Perseus-Soros BioPharmaceutical Fund, according to a company news release. Polaris Venture Partners and Soros Private Equity Partners also participated. John Freund of Skyline, Steven Elms of Perseus-Soros, and Christoph Westphal of Polaris have joined the company’s board.

The round is Advion’s first equity funding since its founding in 1993. The company says it will use the capital to commercialize its NanoMate platform for nanoelectrospray mass spectrometry analysis, among other purposes. The technology is used for pharmaceutical discovery and development. The chip used in the NanoMate platform is an array of 100 microfabricated electrospray nozzles.

May 7, 2002 — Movaz Networks Inc. has announced the closing of a $60 million funding round consisting of series C financing and strategic business agreement.

The company’s founder and board chairman, Bijan Khosravi, said he thinks this will be the last round of funding. The company, which makes hardware and software for all-optical networking, says it has been shipping products since the fourth quarter of last year. Its iWSS switching platforms use MEMS switch arrays.

Investors include Oak Investment Partners, Worldview Technology Partners, Menlo Ventures, Meritech Capital Partners, Anschutz Investment Company, Telus Ventures, Silicon Valley BancVentures Inc. and GATX Ventures Inc. Oak led the round.

MIDLAND, MICH. – Dow Chemical Co. announced the addition of five new members to its SiLKnet Alliance, a collaboration working to create products and processes for low-k dielectric materials. Kulicke & Soffa was among the new members, making it the first back-end company to join the group.

Dow Chemical has been working with many partners to develop its family of SiLK low-k materials as part of a new generation of wafer fab processes. An issue with many low-k materials, though, has been their robustness during assembly processes, such as wire bonding. The addition of K&S should help the alliance address these issues. Greg Bauer, the development director for the SiLKnet Alliance, said, “With expertise in assembly and test, Kulicke & Soffa's membership complements the goal of the SiLKnet Alliance to extend applications support to the back-end.”

April 25, 2002 – Murray Hill, NJ – Scientists at Bell Labs, the research and development arm of Lucent Technologies, have found a way to peer deep inside a semiconductor and create an image of a single impurity atom in silicon. The feat – claimed by Bell Labs to be the first time that an individual impurity has been pictured in its undisturbed state within a crystal — was achieved using a special electron microscope, and is as difficult as seeing a footprint on the moon from the Earth.

This breakthrough will allow scientists to gain an understanding of
how exactly impurities influence the properties of semiconductors, which is needed to shrink the size of future generations of high-speed electronic equipment.

The breakthrough is described in an article published in the journal
Nature.

In an accompanying commentary in Nature, Professor Paul Peercy, dean of
engineering of the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a former president of International SEMATECH, writes that the Bell Labs results “are important in understanding the distribution of impurities in silicon at an atomic level; they will also be important in increasing our understanding of a wide range of complex materials.”

Impurities – or “dopants”, as they are known in the electronics industry — are introduced into semiconductors like silicon to provide charge carriers that control the semiconductor’s electrical properties. As chip components continue to shrink in accordance with Moore’s Law, which maintains that the processing power of electronic components such as transistors doubles every 18 months as their size shrinks by half, the industry is approaching a point where just a few atoms of impurities could determine the function of a particular device.

“It has become critically important to both image and understand the
chemical and physical environment within devices, because these properties will ultimately determine the extent to which we can continue to shrink silicon dimensions,” said Elsa Reichmanis, director of the materials research department at Bell Labs. “This work builds a solid foundation for our ongoing research in this important area of technology.”

By using a scanning transmission electron microscope, a team led by physicist David Muller of Bell Labs succeeded in directly imaging individual antimony dopant atoms within crystalline silicon. Previous techniques had not been able to look inside crystals; when dopants were imaged, they were only imaged on the surface. Yet, scientists knew that atoms inside a crystal behave very differently to those on a surface.

“Now we can look at things hidden inside a solid, in their natural environment, ” said Muller. “It’s as qualitatively different as seeing how an animal behaves in a zoo and how it behaves in its natural habitat.”

The Bell Labs technique is extremely sensitive and can be applied to almost any material, not just semiconductors. It has already proved useful in troubleshooting and characterizing optoelectronics components.

“If you think of an 8-inch silicon wafer on which we grow our chips as the size of the United States, a single transistor is the size of a car, and a single atom is the size of a pin. We are able to locate the equivalent of a few pins, hidden in a few cars, somewhere in the United States,” Muller said.

Other members of the research team were Paul Voyles, John Grazul and Paul Citrin of Bell Labs and Hans Gossmann of Agere Systems.

“This work opens up a new chapter in materials science and technology:
microscopy with spatial and chemical resolution at an atomic scale in the bulk,” said Federico Capasso, physical research vice president at Bell Labs.

By Kyle James
Small Times Correspondent

HANNOVER, Germany, April 25, 2002 — Germany has long considered itself a loser in the flat panel display industry. And for good reason, since about 97 percent of all flat panel displays are produced in Asia.

Now the country is ready to steal some of that business away from the Far East and it sees the current development of new flat screen technology as the ideal time to strike.

To get ready for battle, 13 companies that are part of the German Flat Panel Display Forum

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This image from Siemens shows one
possible use for flat panel displays: A
cell phone with a roll-up display that
allows full Internet access.
(DFF), an industry consortium, formed a new company this month called the German OLED Reference Line, or DORA for short. DORA’s goal is simple: Elaborate a strategy and a product to bring the production of competitive flat panel displays to Germany. It hopes to do this by jumping in while the technology for flat displays is changing.

OLED is the magic acronym, standing for Organic Light-Emitting Diodes. It is a technology based on light-emitting plastics that proponents say is head and shoulders above LCD display technology, which is used in about 90 percent of today’s flat panel displays.

“Imagine having a 13-inch TV screen — one that is as thick as a credit card,” said Eric Maiser, one of the directors of the display panel consortium that formed DORA, “or the day when you can just inkjet print your display.” OLED displays are superior to LCD displays in that they use less energy, are brighter, and can be viewed from any angle.

To create an OLED display, a plastic substrate is covered with up to four layers of light-emitting plastics. Four layers might sound like a lot, but together they are only approximately 150 nanometers thick.

“It needs of bit more development, but production can be dirt cheap,” Maiser said.

Part of DORA’s mission is to kick-start that last step of development — for example, finding a way to encapsulate the OLEDs, which are very sensitive to water vapor and oxygen.

DORA has come together now because research by the German Flat Panel Display Forum showed that if the country wanted to be at the forefront of the new display technology, it had to act now. It missed out on the current market when Japan beat the world in discovering the success potential of display technology in the 1980s and invested early to expand production capacity. The Japanese have already launched flat panel displays that uses a hybrid OLED technology, but not one with all the benefits and long life of the proposed German version, according to Maiser.

DORA plans to spend the next year figuring out the last technical obstacles and hopes to launch its pilot line in mid 2003, with mass production by 2005. “We want to introduce this new production technology to really be able to make money out of this,” he said.

But before they make any money, they are going to have to find quite a bit of it. DORA itself has been financed to the tune of approximately $800,000 by the 13 companies taking part, along with help from the Federal State of Saxony and the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology. But it is estimated the company will need an investment of $50 million in the first year to come up with the pilot line, and $500 million to eventually build an OLED volume manufacturing plant. A good part of this first year will be spent looking for those investors.

Consortia like the German Flat Panel Display Forum are not unusual in Germany, where companies often come together in loose associations to share information and pursue research, up to a point. When they feel their proprietary information might be at risk, they usually break away. The German display panel consortium is made up of 70 members, including Siemens, BMW, Samsung, IBM and several Fraunhofer Institutes.

These kinds of consortia have distinct advantages, according to Silke Erlemann of Covion Organic Semiconductors, which is one of the DORA’s founding companies. “When new technology is at an early stage, it helps to have partners,” she said. “It lowers your investment and it lowers your risk.”

Some 25 Sandia National Laboratories researchers are working on an project that will establish the fundamental science and technology base to replace the country’s primary lighting source, incandescent bulbs and fluorescent tubes, with semiconductor light-emitting diodes (LEDs) – solid state lighting.

Sandia Senior Scientist James Gee, together with department managers Jerry Simmons and Bob Biefeld, head up the project.

“In some ways the revolution in lighting can be compared to the revolution in electronics that began 50 years ago and is only now reaching maturity,” Gee says. “Just as for electronics, glass bulbs and vacuum tubes are giving way to semiconductors. And as in the microelectronics revolution, many of the possible applications for solid-state lighting will occur in ways that have not yet been envisioned.”

LEDs are already found in toys, electronics, traffic lights, automobile signals, and large outdoor displays – devices that require durability, compactness, and cool operation. In some applications they also enable significant cost savings due to their lower consumption of energy: LED-based red traffic lights, for example, consume one-tenth the energy of their incandescent counterparts, enabling them to pay for themselves in as little as one year.

As LED technology matures, revolution leaders expect solid-state lighting to also rapidly outdistance conventional lighting sources in both performance and cost.

“This new white light source could change the way we live, and the way we consume energy,” says Simmons, who manages the project. “LEDs could be 10 times more efficient than incandescent bulbs and two times more efficient than fluorescents. Clearly, LEDs’ replacement of conventional light sources would significantly reduce worldwide energy consumption.”

Lighting is presently responsible for roughly 20 percent of electricity consumption. Researchers believe that the development and adoption of solid state lighting technology could reduce the nation’s electrical consumption by 10%.

LEDs were first demonstrated in 1962 by General Electric. The first products were introduced in 1968 – indicator lamps by Monsanto and an electronic display by Hewlett-Packard. However, LEDs were limited to small-signal applications until 1985 when LED power was increased, resulting in new applications.

In 1993 researchers at several universities in the US and Japan developed a fairly efficient blue light LED based on gallium nitride. Efficiency improvements followed quickly. Today, energy-efficient LEDs are available from red to green to blue light, making it possible to generate white light for illumination.

However, Gee says, LED-based light sources are expensive – more than two orders of magnitude more expensive than commercial incandescent light bulbs – and will not be practical until their costs are reduced and efficiency is further increased.

As part of the LEDsproject, some 25 Sandia researchers are exploring ways to do exactly that – make LEDs more efficient and less costly. They are working on the fundamental science and technology challenges where Sandia has unique capabilities.

Among those challenges are:

  • Developing an improved understanding of the physics of the gallium nitride-based materials that are the base materials of the LEDs.
  • Improving optoelectronic devices and materials for abundant photon generation and high light extraction efficiency.
  • Improving wavelength conversion and color mixing technologies for generation of white light.
  • Improving packaging technologies for high-power LEDs.

Numerous industrial companies, as well as universities, are working to develop technologies for solid state lighting. However, Biefeld says, “in many respects Sandia is unique, due to our extensive capabilities in semiconductor growth and processing, reactor modeling, and experimental and theoretical materials physics, all located at a single institution.”

“These are exciting challenges that will engage our scientists over the next several years,” Gee says. “Our work will position Sandia to become a leading developer of the science and technology for this revolution in lighting.”

By Peg Brickley
Small Times Correspondent

April 11, 2002 — Optobionics Inc., one of three U.S.-based developers of retinal replacement technology, appears to be gaining ground in the race to produce the first microscopic system to help the blind see.

The Illinois-based private firm picked up $20 million in new funding earlier this year and is readying an article for one of the scientific journals that are the chosen

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forum for announcing big scientific news. What that news is, Optobionics will not say.

But the latest round of investment valued the 12-person company at $100 million, according to Alan Chow. A pediatric ophthalmologist, he founded Optobionics with his brother, Vincent, an electrical engineer.

Brian Chee, a partner in the Seattle office of Polaris Venture Partners, said his firm made “a huge bet” on Optobionics, which he said had “an elegant solution combining silicon and biology.”

“In order to get that kind of money, especially in this environment, Optobionics definitely made a strong showing of future promise,” said Scott Maece, an executive at corporate backer Ciba Vision, based outside of Atlanta.

Optobionics has “numerous national and international patents” to back that valuation up, Chow said. The company also has news coming out soon that is likely to impress the scientific community.

In the past two years the company implanted microphotodiode-equipped chips into the back of the eyes of half a dozen blind people in FDA-approved safety tests.

The Optobionics artificial retina is a chip about 2 millimeters in diameter, holding about 3,500 light-sensors that convert light energy to electrical signals, mimicking the eye’s own photoreceptors. When tucked into a pocket behind still-active cells in damaged retinas, the microphotodiodes are supposed to stimulate the live portions of the retina to “see.”

The company, which is working with MEMS specialists, has so far given only limited information on the results of the surgeries, citing FDA rules for early clinical trials.

“There has been no infection, no inflammation, no degradation,” said David McComb, chief information officer at Optobionics. “In effect, the patients are tolerating the devices and the devices are tolerating the patients.”

But the evidence of $20 million in new venture cash, the addition of a new corporate backer, Medtronic Inc., to the roster of investors and the planned journal publication suggest the news out of the first small trial will be pretty good.

A team from Optobionics is slated to talk about the safety, feasibility and efficacy of the company’s artificial silicon retinal prosthesis in less than a month, when the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology holds its annual meeting in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. Chow and doctors from Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans and Rush-Presbyterian St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago will tell what the technology has shown in the first small group of test subjects, people blinded by retinitis pigmentosa.

“RP,” as it is known to eye doctors, is one of a number of pathologies that blind by attacking the rods and cones that make up the natural array of light sensors in the human retina.

Optobionics is one of a number of companies concocting technologies to counter those diseases. Besides the Midwestern private venture, there are university-based teams on both the East and West coasts working on systems to transmit images to the brain when diseased retinal tissues are no longer up to the task.

At the University of Southern California’s Doheny Eye Institute, a synthetic retina is headed to clinical trials soon, the product of work that began at the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Most of the Wilmer synthetic retina team left late last year to continue the work at USC. Led by Mark S. Humayun and Eugene de Juan Jr., the team now operates out of the Doheny Retina Institute and works with Second Sight, a Valencia, Calif. firm.

Unlike the Optobionics implant, the Doheny design involves an external camera that sends signals to a receptor array on a chip implanted near the ganglion cells, which send signals to the brain.

The system is similar to one that has been in the works for years at the Harvard-M.I.T. Retinal Implant Project. The East Coast academics are tapping the Cornell Nanofabrication Facility for technical expertise for their design, which aims to put as much of the burden as possible on external cameras, computers and transmitters.

With FDA approval, the Harvard-MIT group has conducted very early stage experiments with human volunteers who, awake on the operating table, answered questions about what they thought they “saw” via a simple system of wireless transmission and microchip.

Douglas B. Shire of the Cornell nanofabrication facility cited the difficulty of getting electronic circuits to operate in the saline environment of the eye as a major hurdle.

“We need to protect the circuitry in the implant from the body environment and vice versa,” Shire said. “We need a biocompatible coating that will withstand the eye environment, which is a salty sort of liquid.”

Biocompatibility is one reason Optobionics puts its chip behind the eye, instead of next to the neurons, where the Harvard-MIT and USC designers plan to place it, Chow explained.

“The placement of the device in the subretinal space protects it somewhat from that attack,” the ophthalmologist said. “It’s a relatively dry environment, as opposed to placement in the vitreous cavity, where essentially it has to operate in sea water.”

Shire, an electrical engineer who cut his teeth on microelectronics in the Silicon Valley, said his team was still testing to find the ideal electrode size.

“The key factor in the design of the implant is minimizing the amount of power that can be used, because there’s a limited budget as far as power is concerned,” Shire said.

“In turn, that limits the size of the stimulating array that conveys information to the patient, because obviously a larger array would consume more power.”

And what is Optobionics’ answer to questions about whether its implanted array has enough power to transmit images using only the light that enters the eye, rather than external cameras, computers and transmitters? Chow would only say that the information is proprietary.

Meanwhile, experiments in size and materials continue in the hunt for the best formulation for the microphotodiodes to do their work of converting photons of light into electricity to signal the brain without corroding. But it appears that the future of synthetic retinas is hooked to the next wave of developments in chip fabrication and nanotechnology.

Tests at the Cornell nanofabrication facility indicate that electrodes with diameters over 300 microns will carry the image best. However, a January presentation at the MEMS 2002 conference by Second Sight involved conducting posts one-tenth that diameter incorporated onto a chip surface.

When it comes to synthetic retina components, hopes are that smaller, more sophisticated structures will deliver the finest resolution at the smallest cost in power.

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April 10, 2002 – Tokyo, Japan – Hitachi Ltd., Mitsubishi Electric Corp., and Seiko Epson Corp. will participate in a joint stepper development project led by Sony Corp. and Tokyo Seimitsu Co., sources at the companies said.

Project members, including NEC Corp., Rohm Co., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Sharp Corp., and most Japanese semiconductor manufacturers, will total 24, reported the Nihon Keizai Shimbun.

The Sony-Tokyo Seimitsu group is currently developing the next-generation stepper. The stepper will use a beam of electrons to draw finer circuit lines. The members aim to commercialize equipment suitable for making a wide variety of system LSI chips with a small-lot next year.

Hitachi and Mitsubishi have already agreed to integrate their system LSI operations by next spring. They plan to introduce the new steppers into their joint production lines as soon as possible.

April 9, 2002 – Durham, NC – Cree Inc. plans to open a Japan office in Tokyo to bring Cree’s technology and engineering support closer to the Japanese customer.

In connection with the opening of the office, Sumitomo Corp. has been named as Cree’s strategic partner and has entered into agreements with Cree to purchase approximately $24 million of Cree’s LED products over a 15-month period ending June 2003, based on customer demand and subject to the terms and conditions of the new agreements. The agreements are primarily for the purchase of Cree’s MegaBright and XBright LEDs.

This new partnership will replace Cree’s existing distributorship arrangements in Japan effective in June 2002.

Sumitomo will have exclusive distribution rights in Japan to Cree’s LED chip products and silicon carbide wafer products for a minimum of three years. Cree Japan personnel will work with and support the sales activities of the Sumitomo team dedicated to the Cree product line.

The office is scheduled to open during the quarter ending June 2002.

By Robert O’Connor
Small Times Correspondent

April 3, 2002 — A spinoff from the physics department of Trinity College Dublin is attracting strong support for the microfluidics technology it is developing for the biotech, health and drug industries.

Allegro Technologies has received $1.1 million in venture capital funding from the Guinness Ireland Ulster Bank Equity Fund and $264,000 from Enterprise Ireland, a government agency set up to promote homegrown business. The money will go to

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Allegro Technologies plans to launch its
microfluidics product at the end of May.
Its customers will be pharmaceutical and
biotechnology companies.
research and production, and sales and marketing.

Jurgen Osing, Allegro’s chief executive and managing director, said that the investment will also enable Allegro to increase its staff from eight to 14 people over the next two months.

Allegro has also entered into a $1.5 million licensing agreement with Gilson Inc., a U.S. analytical instrument manufacturer. Gilson, based in Middleton, Wis., serves the biotech and pharmaceutical industries in the United States and Europe.

Allegro plans to launch its product at the International Conference and Exhibition on Drug Discovery May 27-30 in Basel, Switzerland.

“The customers primarily will be pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies who engage in high throughput screening, miniaturized assays,” Osing said.

Microfluidics, Osing said, is not well developed in Ireland. The main activity in Europe, he said, is in Switzerland, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Allegro, Osing added, is also looking at possibilities in the DNA microarray market. This involves the application of DNA-based data to microchips to support medical research and diagnosis.

Allegro was founded in 2000. The nucleus of the company was the nanotechnology research group of Igor Shvets, the Trinity College professor under whom Osing studied for his Ph.D. Market research led the team to focus on biochip miniaturization in the life science sector.

The group found a bottleneck in the liquid handling area, particularly in the ability of technology to dispense very small volumes accurately, Osing said. This capability, Osing said, is vital to the success of miniaturized assays and the production of microarrays. The researchers were able to dispense liquids in measures as small as one nanoliter.

Such a capability is useful in the diagnosis of medical conditions. It is also of obvious benefit to pharmaceutical companies trying to squeeze as much research as possible out of costly laboratory compounds. Reducing the amount of material that is needed for research can also speed throughputs and save on storage and preservation costs. Allegro has designed its product to accommodate a wide range of fluids.

Osing said that the global drug development and drug research market is worth about $80 billion. He said that the instrumentation market to facilitate that research is worth about $2 billion.

Ireland has an active nanotechnology sector, according to Robert Flood, senior development adviser at Enterprise Ireland. Flood said that the government has funneled money into basic research through a body called Science Foundation Ireland. The two main themes, he said, are information and communications technologies and biotechnology.

Flood believes that nanotechnology is well suited to Ireland’s research infrastructure. “It’s an enabling technology that will actually straddle practically every single technological area,” he said. “An application developed in a chemistry lab can equally find its way into a computer or into a novel drug delivery system.”

Peter Sandys, a director of Seroba Bioventures, a newly formed Dublin-based biotech fund, said that the Irish government is making a major effort to build up the country’s scientific infrastructure. Apart from Science Foundation Ireland, Sandys said, the Higher Education Authority has been making money available for universities to improve their science facilities. At the same time, Sandys said, Enterprise Ireland has been working to commercialize biotech.

“This is a completely different climate to what we had before,” Sandys said, “particularly in the biotechnology area, where there was a minuscule budget.”

Sandys, who formerly ran the corporate finance operation in Dublin for what is now ABN Ambro, said that there are number of venture capital funds in Ireland focused on the information technology industry. In 2000, he said, 94 percent of all venture capital money in Ireland went into IT. Given the small size of the Irish economy, Sandys said, Irish IT startups have their eyes on overseas markets.

Sandys describes the attitude of Irish investors toward biotech as “embryonic.” Many, he said, made money in the dot-com economy and then lost it. They don’t want to repeat the experience. “The government is working hard to create the right climate,” he said. “It’s going to take success stories, however, to convince people.”

Osing said that Allegro is looking to establish further commercial relationships with leading systems suppliers either through licensing or distribution arrangements.

Osing said that Allegro’s product is distinguished by its “simplicity, robustness and price-performance ratio.” The competition, he said, will come from the main laboratory instrument manufacturers. They are located, he said, in Germany and the United Kingdom, but primarily in the United States. Osing declined to discuss Allegro’s expected revenues.

Allegro has filed 10 patent applications relating to its technology. “And there are a lot more coming in the pipeline, which we haven’t started prototyping yet,” Osing said.

Allegro is an international group. Osing is a German who came to Ireland to work on his Ph.D. Shvets is a native of Ukraine and a naturalized Irish citizen. Sergei Makarov, another member of the team, is Russian.

Ireland, Osing said, offers a congenial environment for research and entrepreneurship. He added that the Irish educational system has also done well in supplying trained talent. “There is a very strong focus on technology transfer out of research into the commercial world,” Osing said. “It is strongly encouraged here.”

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