Category Archives: LEDs

September 5, 2008: Fairway Medical Technologies, Inc. has received a $900,000, 3-year contract from the Department of the Navy to apply its optoacoustic technology, which uses targeted nanoparticle contrast agents, to the real-time detection of blood-borne pathogens and biological warfare agents under battlefield conditions.

This grant is part of a larger, $3 million project led by Prof. Randolph Glickman, principal investigator from the U. of Texas Health Science Center (UTHSC) at San Antonio.

The optoacoustic biosensor tests samples of blood plasma or other liquids by using monoclonal antibodies (MAB) targeted to specific pathogens.

“Elongated gold nanoparticles designed to strongly absorb near-infrared laser pulses can be conjugated to each type of MAB to create a specificity mechanism that will signal the presence of targeted pathogens,” explained Alexander Oraevsky, VP of research and development at Fairway and an inventor of this nano-biosensor. “When the nanoparticles produce an acoustic response to laser pulses, the presence and concentration of the pathogens is established.”

Unique ultrawide-band transducers developed by Fairway for medical imaging and other analytical optoacoustic systems fit the signal acquisition needs of this application, he added.

“This research is intended to develop a rugged battlefield instrument capable of detecting biological agents such as anthrax, plague, smallpox, and others with the speed, accuracy, sensitivity, and reliability of analytical techniques and instruments found in the state-of-the-art laboratory today,” said Dr. Glickman.

After completing the R&D part of this project, Fairway will manufacture the devices for the Navy and other DoD customers, added Fairway president James Meador.

The grant, entitled “Rapid identification of pathogenic agents in biological samples using pulsed laser optoacoustic spectroscopy with targeted nanoparticle contrast agents,” will be carried out as a collaborative project between UTHSC, Fairway Medical Technologies, and the Naval Health Research Center Detachment Directed Energy Bioeffects Laboratory at Brooks City-Base.

“Early front-line detection of biological threats using this kind of rugged battlefield system will provide critical information that can save Navy sailors and lives of other US military personnel, as well as support fast, well-informed command decision-making,” commented Norman Barsalou, project co-investigator from the Navy Bioeffects lab. “We are proud that this collaboration between the UT Health Science Center San Antonio, the Naval Health Research Center Detachment at Brooks, and Fairway Medical Technologies can move this important work ahead.”

September 5, 2008: Evident Technologies, Inc. and Philips Electronics signed a non-exclusive licensing agreement paving the way for commercialization of nanocrystal-based light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Evident intends to immediately launch a new line of low-power LED and LED based products that use semiconductor nanocrystals as a phosphor.

“LEDs last longer and are much more efficient than incandescent lights but are limited to only a few colors,” said company CEO Clint Ballinger. “We are excited about this licensing agreement and leveraging our technology to bring additional colors to these light sources.”

LEDs are fundamentally constrained to emit only a single color of light. The current state-of-the-art white LEDs use phosphors to convert blue LEDs into “white” or other colors. However, the underlying phosphor technology can limit the range of colors that are obtainable. Semiconductor nanocrystal technology removes these color limitations. Evident has been developing semiconductor nanocrystal technology for years and plans to immediately launch commercial LED products based on this technology.

“We have long believed that there is a market for semiconductor nanocrystal technology and we are looking forward to the technology being commercialized,” said Dave Barnes, senior IP council at Philips.

“The LED industry seems eager to embrace this technology,” added Dave Duncan, COO of Evident Technologies. “Our new line of LED products will enable us to enter the retail market as well, making them the world’s first consumer products based on semiconductor nanocrystals.”

September 2, 2008: Scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed a simple process for mass producing molecular tubes of identical — and precisely programmable — circumferences, a technological feat that may allow the use of the molecular tubes in a number of nanotechnology applications.

The molecular tubes are composed of wound-up strands of DNA, which has been considered an ideal construction material for self-assembling molecular structures and devices because two complementary strands can automatically recognize and bind with each other. DNA has been used to form rigid building blocks (“tiles”), which can further assemble into extended lattice structures, including tubes. However, it has been difficult to control the diameters of such tubes.

Researchers led by Peng Yin, a senior postdoctoral scholar in bioengineering and computer science at Caltech’s Center for Biological Circuit Design, have designed a series of flexible, single-stranded DNA molecules, called single-stranded DNA tiles, each of which is exactly 42 bases long and contains four modular binding sites. By pairing up the complementary binding sites, these single-stranded tiles bind with each other in a particular orientation like Lego pieces snapped together, forming a tube composed of parallel DNA helices.

The circumference of the resulting tube is determined by the number of different 42-base pieces used in its construction. For example, four pieces create a tube with a circumference of 12nm; five pieces, a 15nm-circumference tube; and six pieces, an 18nm tube.
Caltech is not the first to make DNA tubes with controlled circumferences, but Yin noted that “compared with previous approaches, our method is distinctively simple and modular.” The simplicity and modularity of the approach permits the description of the tube design using a simple graphical abstraction system developed earlier this year in the laboratory of Caltech associate prof. Niles Pierce.

Having nanotubes of various and precisely controlled sizes provides their user with more options. In addition, nanotubes of different sizes have varying mechanical properties; for example, tubes with a smaller diameter are more flexible, while tubes with a larger diameter are more rigid. The nanotubes might eventually serve as templates for manufacturing nanowires with controlled diameters; the diameters of electron-conducting nanowires would help determine the electronic properties of the devices they are used to construct.

“The simplicity of the single-stranded tile approach promises to enable us to design ever more complex self-assembling molecular systems. The work is simultaneously elegant and useful,” said Erik Winfree, associate professor of computer science, computation and neural systems, and bioengineering at Caltech. Winfree’s laboratory was the primary host of Yin’s research at Caltech.

The paper, “Programming DNA Tube Circumferences,” involving joint work with Caltech and Duke U., was published in the August 8 in the journal Science. The work was funded by the Center for Biological Circuit Design at Caltech and the National Science Foundation.

August 21, 2008: Engineers at Purdue U. have created a tiny motorized positioning device that has twice the dexterity of similar devices being developed for applications that include biological sensors and more compact, powerful computer hard drives. The device, called a monolithic comb drive, could be used as a “nanoscale manipulator” that precisely moves or senses movement and forces.

The devices also can be used in watery environments for probing biological molecules, said Jason Vaughn Clark, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and mechanical engineering, who created the design.

The monolithic comb drives could make it possible to improve a class of probe-based sensors that detect viruses and biological molecules. The sensors detect objects using two different components: A probe is moved while at the same time the platform holding the specimen is positioned. The new technology would replace both components with a single one — the monolithic comb drive.

This illustration depicts a tiny device called a monolithic comb drive, which might be used as a high-precision “nanopositioner” for such uses as biological sensors, computer hard drives, and other possible applications.(Source: Birck Nanotechnology Center, Purdue U.)
Click here for larger version

The innovation could allow sensors to work faster and at higher resolution and would be small enough to fit on a microchip. The higher resolution might be used to design future computer hard drives capable of high-density data storage and retrieval. Another possible use might be to fabricate or assemble miniature micro and nanoscale machines.

Research findings were detailed in a technical paper presented in July during the University Government Industry Micro/Nano Symposium in Louisville. The work is based at the Birck Nanotechnology Center at Purdue’s Discovery Park.

Conventional comb drives have a pair of comblike sections with “interdigitated fingers,” meaning they mesh together. These meshing fingers are drawn toward each other when a voltage is applied. The applied voltage causes the fingers on one comb to become positively charged and the fingers on the other comb to become negatively charged, inducing an attraction between the oppositely charged fingers. If the voltage is removed, the spring-loaded comb sections return to their original position.

By comparison, the new monolithic device has a single structure with two perpendicular comb drives.

Clark calls the device monolithic because it contains comb drive components that are not mechanically and electrically separate. Conventional comb drives) are structurally “decoupled” to keep opposite charges separated.

“Comb drives represent an advantage over other technologies,” Clark said. “In contrast to piezoelectric actuators that typically deflect, or move, a fraction of a micrometer, comb drives can deflect tens to hundreds of micrometers. And unlike conventional comb drives, which only move in one direction, our new device can move in two directions – left to right, forward and backward – an advance that could open up the door for many applications.”

Clark also has invented a way to determine the precise deflection and force of such microdevices while reducing heat-induced vibrations that could interfere with measurements.

Current probe-based biological sensors have a resolution of about 20 nanometers.

“Twenty nanometers is about the size of 200 atoms, so if you are scanning for a particular molecule, it may be hard to find,” Clark said. “With our design, the higher atomic-scale resolution should make it easier to find.”

Properly using such devices requires engineers to know precisely how much force is being applied to comb drive sensors and how far they are moving. The new design is based on a technology created by Clark called electro micro metrology, which enables engineers to determine the precise displacement and force that’s being applied to, or by, a comb drive. The Purdue researcher is able to measure this force by comparing changes in electrical properties such as capacitance or voltage.

The findings are an extension of research to create an ultra-precise measuring system for devices having features on the size scale of nanometers. Clark has led research to create devices that “self-calibrate,” meaning they are able to precisely measure themselves. Such measuring methods and standards are needed to better understand and exploit nanometer-scale devices.

The size of the entire device is less than one millimeter, or a thousandth of a meter. The smallest feature size is about three micrometers, roughly one-thirtieth as wide as a human hair.

“You can make them smaller, though,” Clark said. “This is a proof of concept. The technology I’m developing should allow researchers to practically and efficiently extract dozens of geometric and material properties of their microdevices just by electronically probing changes in capacitance or voltage.”

In addition to finite element analysis, Clark used a simulation tool that he developed called Sugar.

“Sugar is fast and allows me to easily try out many design ideas,” he said. “After I narrow down to a particular design, I then use finite element analysis for fine-tuning. Finite element analysis is slow, but it is able to model subtle physical phenomena that Sugar doesn’t do as well.”

Clark’s research team is installing Sugar on the nanoHub this summer, making the tool available to other researchers. The nanoHub is operated by the Network for Computational Nanotechnology, funded by the National Science Foundation and housed at Purdue’s Birck Nanotechnology Center.

The researchers also are in the process of fabricating the devices at the Birck Nanotechnology Center.

August 19, 2008 — NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander has taken the first-ever image of a single particle of Mars’ ubiquitous dust, using its atomic force microscope.
The particle — shown at higher magnification than anything ever seen from another world — is a rounded particle about one micrometer, or one millionth of a meter, across. It is a speck of the dust that cloaks Mars. Such dust particles color the Martian sky pink, feed storms that regularly envelop the planet and produce Mars’ distinctive red soil.

“This is the first picture of a clay-sized particle on Mars, and the size agrees with predictions from the colors seen in sunsets on the Red Planet,” said Phoenix co-investigator Urs Staufer of theUniversity of Neuchatel , Switzerland, who leads a Swiss consortium that made the microscope .
“Taking this image required the highest resolution microscope operated off Earth and a specially designed substrate to hold the Martian dust,” said Tom Pike, Phoenix science team member from Imperial College London. “We always knew it was going to be technically very challenging to image particles this small.” It took a very long time, roughly a dozen years, to develop the device that is operating in a polar region on a planet now about 350 million kilometers or 220 million miles away.

The atomic force microscope maps the shape of particles in three dimensions by scanning them with a sharp tip at the end of a spring. During the scan, invisibly fine particles are held by a series of pits etched into a substrate microfabricated from a silicon wafer. Pike’s group at Imperial College produced these silicon microdiscs.

The atomic force microscope can detail the shapes of particles as small as about 100 nanometers, about one one-thousandth the width of a human hair. That is about 100 times greater magnification than seen with Phoenix’s optical microscope, which made its first images of Martian soil about two months ago. Until now, Phoenix’s optical microscope held the record for producing the most highly magnified images to come from another planet.

“I’m delighted that this microscope is producing images that will help us understand Mars at the highest detail ever,” Staufer said. “This is proof of the microscope’s potential. We are now ready to start doing scientific experiments that will add a new dimension to measurements being made by other Phoenix lander instruments.”

“After this first success, we’re now working on building up a portrait gallery of the dust on Mars,” Pike added.
Mars’ ultra-fine dust is the medium that actively links gases in the Martian atmosphere to processes in Martian soil, so it is critically important to understanding Mars’ environment, the researchers said.
The particle seen in the atomic force microscope image was part of a sample scooped by the robotic arm from the “Snow White” trench and delivered to Phoenix’s microscope station in early July. The microscope station includes the optical microscope, the atomic force microscope and the sample delivery wheel. It is part of a suite of tools called Phoenix’s Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer.

The Phoenix mission is led by Peter Smith from the University of Arizona with project management at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and development partnership at Lockheed Martin, Denver. International contributions come from the Canadian Space Agency; the University of Neuchatel; the universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus in Denmark; the Max Planck Institute in Germany; and the Finnish Meteorological Institute. The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA.

August 18, 2008 — Accelerator Corporation, a privately–held biotechnology investment and development company, announced the formation of a new company, Mirina Corporation, focused on developing therapeutics using Minor Groove Binder technology to affect cellular processes involving microRNAs. Mirina has exclusively licensed the technology from Nanogen, Inc. (www.nanogen.com) a publicly traded biotechnology company.

Mirina’s technology is based upon Nanogen’s for use in therapeutics and is Accelerator’s first investment in a technology spinout fro proprietary Minor Groove Binder technology for making novel microRNA (miRNA) therapeutics with enhanced properties. MiRNAs are a recently identified mechanism for gene regulation. Recent breakthroughs and potential applications of technologies to affect miRNAs and to use miRNA-based compounds as therapeutic agents have attracted interest from biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies and resulted in several partnerships and mergers and acquisitions activity. By improving the properties of miRNA therapeutics, Mirina’s technology presents promising potential for treating a wide range of diseases, including cancers, infectious diseases and various metabolic disorders.

Nanogen has developed and patented novel methods for preparing oligonucleotides appended with Minor Groove Binding (MGB) agents — chemical groups that have high affinity for helical DNA or RNA. This technology has been exploited by Nanogen for molecular diagnostics and has also been licensed by Applied Biosystems and ThermoFisher for research applications in Real Time PCR. By incorporating the MGB technology into miRNA therapeutics, Mirina’s novel MGB-oligonucleotide compounds are anticipated to exhibit superior properties, such as enhanced target selectivity and significantly better potency.

David McElligott, Ph.D., formerly the senior director of drug discovery of ICOS, will be the vice president of research and development for Mirina. During his 10 years at ICOS, Dr. McElligott coordinated the discovery and clinical entry of numerous early stage products. Collaborations with Nanogen will be overseen by Dr. W. Mahoney, vice president of research and development, who has led the efforts to develop the proprietary MGB technology.

“Mirina is the ninth company in which we have invested at Accelerator,” said Accelerator CEO Carl Weissman, “and it is the first based upon spinning technology out of an established publicly-traded biotechnology company. We are very excited to be entering the interesting area of nucleic acid-based therapeutics and believe that the Nanogen MGB technology should confer a significant advantage and differentiation to this effort.”

“The field of miRNA holds great promise for treating a wide variety of diseases and we are hopeful that the proven MGB core technology will provide Mirina with significant advantages in this highly competitive and potentially lucrative area of therapeutic product development,” said Steve Gillis, Managing Director of ARCH Venture Partners.

The syndicate of investors leading the Series A investment in Mirina included Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Amgen Ventures, ARCH Venture Partners, OVP Venture Partners and WRF Capital.

Protecting Brand Reputation


August 15, 2008

By Carsten Barth, Elcoteq

At this time of economic downturn and with reduced consumer confidence, the equity of a brand can be one critical factor in ensuring that sales and margins are maintained while lesser brands get squeezed. Brand equity can be a function of many things &#151 image, price, innovation, tradition &#151 but at the end of the day, they all boil down to reputation.

As profit margins across electronics and personal communications industries become tighter, the pressure is on to protect and enhance the major global brands to avoid competing entirely on price. Indeed, some of the world’s blue-chip consumer electronics brands, such as Bose or TAG McLaren, have invested heavily in deliberately positioning themselves above price-sensitive markets by creating huge equity in their brands; protecting their reputation and positioning is vital to their continued success.

Companies can invest millions in developing a positive reputation over the years, but it can be destroyed in a matter of moments in this age of instant communication. When companies get it wrong, the consequences can be far-reaching. Just look at the impact Mattel’s production problems involving lead paint have had, not just on their brand or the US toy industry, but also on the reputation of China as a provider of top quality consumer goods.

Outsourcing
Maintaining brand reputation is at the heart of generating repeat business. For the protection of business margins, it has become increasingly common to move design and manufacturing to locations with lower capital and operating costs. This has been especially true of the telecommunications industries. With the additional challenge of increased demand from the emerging economies of countries like India and China, it becomes evident why many global IT and telecommunications brands have started to depend more heavily on outsourcing as a means of enabling them to improve their economies-of-scale, while concentrating on business and brand development. Much of the growth attributed to the major telecoms’ infrastructure providers towards the end of 2006 came from their involvement in these emerging markets. However, with outsourcing, it is even more essential that sufficient control be exercised by the brand owner to ensure that the hard-won equity in their brand is not at risk from a devolved production process.

Benefits and Risks
Outsourcing may help an organization to focus on its core competencies, but it also places the brand’s reputation partly in the hands of outsiders. The more partners that are involved, the more vigilant the company must be. John Beckett of Menlo Logistics spoke of a “cascading effect” that results from mistakes by one or more participants in the chain.

It is therefore vital that companies keep a close watch on outsourcing partners. These suppliers must be equal exemplars of best practice if the companies’ brands or reputations are to avoid potential or actual damage. By 2009, the worldwide revenue from EMS is expected to exceed $320 billion. As the world’s 4th largest EMS provider to communications technology companies, Elcoteq regards its brand protection practices as a significant factor in retaining clients in an increasingly competitive market.

Corporate Responsibility
Corporate responsibility has expanded to encompass social, environmental, and economic aspects, with community relations as an example of one of those. Customer and consumer pressure have resulted in a need for more reporting. Working in tandem with this is a steady rise in ethical consumerism. There has been increasing consumer awareness of CR issues and these are now beginning to influence purchasing decisions.

Indeed, there are now websites that in effect transfer control of a brand’s image to the consumer through encouragement of personal reviews. Amazon is a good example. End users are not only reviewing the quality of their purchase, but are also commenting on wider issues associated with the brand or the sector. With such sites growing in number and influence, brand values are being placed under the microscope by both consumers and special interest groups. The brand owner has to ensure that the highest social, environmental and quality standards are maintained in design, manufacturing, and logistics to mitigate any risk to their brand’s reputation.

A brand owner can invest millions in earning a reputation for excellence, but it can be lost in minutes through one piece of negative comment. Helping customers to protect their brands from reputation risk is an important part of the EMS function, and it can be achieved through the quality of their operational processes and safeguards.

For a global EMS, operating in many different countries and cultures in a socially responsible manner presents a great challenge. Adopting the SA8000 standard in every territory in which the company operates, compliance with OHSAS 18001 and ISO 14001 standards, and maintaining additional workplace guidance provide a good foundation. Internal audits of regulatory and legislative compliance must be regularly undertaken. The same compliance standards are expected of the entire supply chain. An important element in brand protection is balancing issues of corporate responsibility with supply chain and manufacturing efficiency.

The EMS can use local knowledge in each territory to provide information to process design and supply chain management and ensure that the work undertaken on behalf of global brand owners is delivered to the highest standards. By engaging the EMS fully in the OEMs design and manufacturing processes, problems of component specification and production, such as those experienced by Microsoft that led to the product recall of the Xbox 360, are more easily avoided.

Local and regional knowledge should also be used to keep ahead of the game. By being aware of planned legislative changes, additional compliance obligations and similar potential constraints on the manufacturing process, the EMS can help provide customers with a competitive advantage.

Legislative Compliance
The requirements of Europe’s WEEE directive concerning extended product life and ease of recycling, along with the RoHS directive, have been in effect for several years and have had a significant impact on the IT, electronics, electrical goods, and communications industries. These EU initiatives set the standard worldwide. 2007 saw China enact its own RoHS legislation. REACH is another on-going initiative that must be monitored. Design for environment has become an important consideration along with design for tear-down, reuse, and end of life. These developments must be followed closely so the EMS can ensure compliance for its customers.

Companies like Research in Motion and Nokia, which have used organizations like Elcoteq in the development of production techniques, design, or supply chain management, have reaped the rewards of such foresight and continue to trade freely in some of the most competitive markets. Manufacturers that failed to take notice are now in catch-up mode trying to comply with regulations, while losing valuable time and money in the process. The impact of failing to anticipate and adapt can have a profound effect, as can be witnessed in the photographic industry where the best lenses used lead in solder and in glass coatings. When lead-free compliance was put into effect, some manufacturers had to abandon many of their most popular models.

For Elcoteq, simple compliance is not enough. Differentiation from the competition is based on exceeding the obligations of the law and doing so in a way that bestows competitive advantage on its customers. Efficiencies in manufacturing and logistics can be modelled in advance of legislative changes, allowing us to work with brand owners to fine-tune the design and manufacturing processes to improve speed to market.

The impact of laws aimed at environmental best practice is straightforward to handle: reduced component redundancy; the use of safer, cleaner materials; and built-in capability for ease of recycling. Of course, corporate responsibility (CR) is not limited to these aspects.

Labor Issues
With increasing pressure from shareholders on corporate social responsibility issues and continuing moves towards ethical investment, one of the major issues that will define good companies or brands is labor practices. As mentioned, SA8000 lies at the heart of processes in this area. Even the most respected brands can get caught by labor problems in their supply chains. Witness the report published in December 2007 by the UK’s Ethical Consumer Research Association on digital camera makers, which criticized a number of top brands for failing to meet minimum standards in working conditions, supply chain policy, and environmental reporting.

With emerging economies such as China and India and newly developed production facilities across much of Asia, where labor costs are low and regulation is lax, finding a partner with market-by-market knowledge and understanding becomes important to ensure long-term returns on investment while protecting corporate and brand reputation.

CR policies need to be integrated into design and production criteria and form part of the company’s transparency in its supply chain operations. The company’s strength lies in part as a result of its close ties with the communities in which it operates. Local management ensures that supply chain management is in keeping with best practice. This approach helps to safeguard the brand and corporate reputations of the company’s customers.

The EMS must treat its customers’ reputation with as much respect as its own. Repeat business shows that this practice works. The ability to marry this approach with conventional EMS activities and deliver the entire, enhanced package helps build strong relationships with great global brands. It’s a simple recipe for success!

Carsten Barth, director of corporate communications, may be contacted at Elcoteq Network S.A., L

August 15, 2008 — Northwestern University nanoscientist Chad A. Mirkin has mass-produced the 2008 Summer Olympics logo — 15,000 times in one square centimeter of space. Mirkin and his colleagues printed the logos, as well as an integrated gold circuit, using a new printing technique called Polymer Pen Lithography (PPL), that can write on three different length scales using only one device. The PPL technique is a fast, inexpensive and simple way to print on the nanometer, micrometer and millimeter length scales.

The logo is so small that 2,500 of them would fit on a single grain of rice. The letters and numbers, “Beijing 2008,” were generated from approximately 20,000 dots that were 90 nanometers in diameter. Then, with more force applied to the pens, the stylized human figure and the Olympic rings were made from approximately 4,000 dots that were 600 nanometers in diameter.
The new printing method could find use in computational tools (the electronics that make up these tools), medical diagnostics (gene chips and arrays of biomolecules) and the pharmaceutical industry (arrays for screening drug candidates), among others.

“While watching the Olympics opening night ceremonies I was delighted to see that printing was highlighted as one of ancient China’s four great inventions,” said Mirkin, George B. Rathmann professor of chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, professor of medicine and professor of materials science and engineering. Mirkin led the study.

“We consider Dip-Pen Nanolithography, which is nanotechnology’s version of the quill pen, and now Polymer Pen Lithography to be two of Northwestern’s most important inventions,” he says.

Polymer Pen Lithography uses arrays of tiny pens made of polymers to print over large areas with nanoscopic through macroscopic resolution. By simply changing contact pressure (and the amount the pens deform), as well as the time of delivery, dots of various diameters can be produced. (The pen tips snap back to their original shape when the pressure is removed.)

“We can go, in a sense, from an ultra fine point Sharpie to one with a fat tip,” said Mirkin, director of Northwestern’s International Institute for Nanotechnology. “The tip of each polymer pen starts with nanometer-scale sharpness, but if we press down harder the tip flattens out. This gives us great flexibility in the structures we can produce.”

In the case of the Olympic logo, the researchers started with a bitmap image of the logo and uniformly printed 15,000 replicas onto a gold substrate using an “ink” of the molecule 16-mercaptohexadecanoic acid. (The ink is a mere one molecule thick.) This took less than 40 minutes.

The integrated circuit the researchers built had features on all three length scales integrated together. Building the circuit took about two hours. As with the Olympic logo, the structures were made by making multiple printing passes with the same tool (the pen array, which has an ink reservoir).

Polymer Pen Lithography simplifies and takes the best of two existing printing techniques — the high registration and sub-50-nanometer resolution of Dip-Pen Nanolithography (DPN) and the use of a polymer stamp to transfer a pattern in microcontact printing. (Mirkin invented DPN in 1999.) The PPL method requires a dot matrix image of the structure to be printed (the Olympic logo, for example) and an atomic force microscope. The researchers have demonstrated arrays with as many as 11 million pens.

The research was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation.

August 14, 2008 — Oxantium Ventures closed a B Series funding round with RF Nano Corporation , a developer of radio frequency devices from carbon nanotubes. Dr. Richard Wirt, a managing director at Oxantium, joins RF Nano’s Board. Oxantium led the $8 million investment, which is syndicated with a southern California based venture capital firm.
RF Nano, based in Orange County, CA, is commercializing the application of carbon-based nanotube technology to RF devices . The result is high power density, discrete and embedded devices targeted at the $60 billion analog and mixed signal communications markets. These devices will improve the performance of military and aerospace systems as well as wireless and data processing products.
Dr. Newton Howard, Oxantium venture’s managing director commented on the investment, “With power densities 100 times greater than silicon and 20 times greater than gallium arsenide, intrinsic cutoff frequencies in the terahertz, inexpensive growth, and the ability to integrate with CMOS, we believe that RF Nano has the potential to radically extend current analog and mixed signal capabilities and open up entirely new product areas in the electronics industry that to date have been limited by the performance and cost of traditional silicon and GaAs solutions.”
RF Nano’s nanotube process technology was developed at the University of California, Irvine by Professor Peter Burke , the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer. The company is targeting the sampling of its first products for the first quarter of 2009.

August 14, 2008 — When you make a new material on a nanoscale how can you see what you have made? A team lead by a Biotechnology and Biological Sciences research Council (BBSRC) fellow has made a significant step toward overcoming this major challenge faced by nanotechnology scientists. The team from the University of Liverpool, The School of Pharmacy (University of London) and the University of Leeds have developed a technique to examine tiny protein molecules called peptides on the surface of a gold nanoparticle.
This is the first time scientists have been able to build a detailed picture of self-assembled peptides on a nanoparticle and it offers the promise of new ways to design and manufacture novel materials on the tiniest scale – one of the key aims of nanoscience.

Engineering new materials through assembly of complex, but tiny, components is difficult for scientists. However, nature has become adept at engineering nanoscale building blocks, e.g. proteins and RNA. These are able to form dynamic and efficient nanomachines such as the cell’s protein assembly machine (the ribosome) and minute motors used for swimming by bacteria.
The BBSRC-funded team, led by Dr Raphaël Lévy, has borrowed from nature, developing a way of constructing complex nanoscale building blocks through initiating self-assembly of peptides on the surface of a metal nanoparticle. Whilst this approach can provide a massive number and diversity of new materials relatively easily, the challenge is to be able to examine the structure of the material.
Using a chemistry-based approach and computer modeling, Dr Lévy has been able to measure the distance between the peptides where they sit assembled on the gold nanoparticle. The technique exploits the ability to distinguish between two types of connection or ‘cross-link’ – one that joins different parts of the same molecule (intramolecular), and another that joins together two separate molecules (intermolecular). As two peptides get closer together there is a transition between the two different types of connection. Computer simulations allow the scientists to measure the distance at which this transition occurs, and therefore to apply it as a sort of molecular ruler. Information obtained through this combination of chemistry and computer molecular dynamics shows that the interactions between peptides leads to a nanoparticle that is relatively organized, but not uniform. This is the first time it has been possible to measure distances between peptides on a nanoparticle and the first time computer simulations have been used to model a single layer of self-assembled peptides.

Dr Lévy said: “As nanotechnology scientists we face a challenge similar to the one faced by structural biologists half a century ago: determining the structure with atomic scale precision of a whole range of nanoscale materials. By using a combination of chemistry and computer simulation we have been able to demonstrate a method by which we can start to see what is going on at the nanoscale.

“If we can understand how peptides self-assemble at the surface of a nanoparticle, we can open up a route towards the design and synthesis of nanoparticles that have complex surfaces. These particles could find applications in the biomedical sciences, for example to deliver drugs to a particular target in the body, or to design sensitive diagnostic tests. In the longer term, these particles could also find applications in new generations of electronic components.”

Professor Nigel Brown, BBSRC Director of Science and Technology, said: “Bionanotechnology holds great promise for the future. We may be able to create stronger, lighter and more durable materials, or new medical applications. Basic science and techniques for working at the nanoscale are providing the understanding that will permit future such applications of bionanotechnology.”