Tag Archives: Small Times Magazine

May 9, 2007 — Boston Micromachines Corp. (BMC) says its MEMS-based deformable mirror products have helped realize achievements in multi photon microscopy, an advanced optical technique that increases the imaging depth in living tissue. Boston University’s Biomedical Engineering Biomicroscopy Lab has recently demonstrated high resolution images of biological tissue using BMC’s deformable mirrors in its multiphoton microscopy research.

BMC’s deformable mirrors allow researchers to resolve images deeper into the tissue. Additionally, researchers will now be able to look at cells and cellular processes in their natural environment, in vivo, which is scientifically more interesting. These advances will pave the way for further progress in the study of neural disorders and various diseases.

May 9, 2007 – Nanotechnology Victoria Ltd. (NanoVic), the key organization for delivering nanotechnology research outcomes to industry in the state of Victoria, Australia, has announced the launch of two companies. Interstitial NanoSystems (Interstitial NS) and Quintain NanoSystems (Quintain NS) are being spun off as independent firms. The spin-offs result from a portfolio of projects and developments built around strategic investment of nearly A$14 million with over a dozen partners since 2004. Both focused on bio-nanotechnology, the pair hopes to revolutionize the way that medicine is delivered.

Dr. Bob Irving, who serves as director of both start-ups, said, “These companies will help to consolidate the key skills, technologies, and manufacturing abilities in the areas of nanomedicine, where Australia and Victoria have strength.” Interstitial NS will focus initially on its pain-free insulin delivery patch for diabetes, while the first product for Quintain NS is a rapid clinical test for the detection of meningitis.

The Interstitial NS transdermal delivery patch for insulin has already been tested on animals by the Victorian College of Pharmacy and is expected to begin pre-clinical trials in September. Interstitial NS is working with Melbourne-based company Catapult to produce a portable prototype device to enable self administration. The patches are manufactured by the Victorian company MiniFAB, while the nanostructured drugs are formulated by Eiffel Technology.

Interstitial NS will also commercialize a device for pulmonary delivery of nanoparticulate drugs. The portable personal inhaler uses Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) technology, with Melbourne-based Charlwood Design designing the prototype pump. Pre-clinical trials are anticipated to start in January 2008.

Meanwhile Quintain NS has a number of products in the pipeline, and will focus first on a test for meningitis detection. The test uses nanoparticle technology to provide a rapid color-based readout, avoiding lengthy bacterial culturing. Also in development are a number of other diagnostic tools. Among them are nanoparticle-based imaging reagents that promise to enable early detection of disease states in humans. And, nanoarray biochips will offer a cost effective method of detection for both salmonella and bovine mastitis, and enzyme biosensor probes are under development for the measurement of sulfite in food and beverages.

Nanotechnology Victoria Ltd is the key organization for delivering nanotechnology research outcomes to Victorian industry. NanoVic has a membership of three universities; Monash, RMIT and Swinburne as research and technology providers, with financial backing from the State Government of Victoria.


Arendar 2007 enables enterprise-wide test data sharing and collaboration. (Image: VI Technology)

May 8, 2007 — VI Technology, Inc., provider of enterprise test systems for electronics, semiconductors, and medical devices/equipment, has released Arendar 2007,
which it says will help companies optimize product performance, quality, and time to market. The software promises instant access to design, characterization, validation and verification, and manufacturing test information across the enterprise.

VI Technology says it has probably invested more resources in this upgrade than in all previous versions of Arendar combined. New features include a drag-and-drop report designer with one-click Web publishing of interactive reports, a customizable Web dashboard, secure data transfers through firewalls, and interactive data mining of swept parametric data. Arendar 2007 also includes a new API providing additional flexibility to customize data importers and analysis plug-ins. These extend Arendar’s built-in capabilities and simplify the integration with other legacy test systems and enterprise applications.

Arendar 2007 supports the latest technologies such as Microsoft Windows Vista, and users can access their reports and data through Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox on different operating systems.

“Arendar 2007 brings proven enterprise technologies to the test and measurement industry,” says Richard House, President of VI Technology. “We’ve taken business intelligence technologies and applied them to design, characterization, and validation testing. Now, managers and test engineers have immediate access to the right information and at the right time so they can focus on improving their product’s performance.”

Arendar centralizes and aggregates test data, automatically generates custom reports, and instantly publishes them to a secure Web site. Managers and engineers access test results securely from any location through a Web browser without concerning for where and how the data is stored or formatted.

Arendar Enterprise Server starts at $14,995.

May 8, 2007 – Belgian carbon nanotube producer Nanocyl has signed an agreement with specialty raw-materials distribution and sales company Velox for the distribution of Nanocyl’s carbon nanotubes-based products in Europe. The partnership covers Nanocyl’s industrial grade multi-wall carbon nanotubes powder and thermoplastic concentrates.

Nanocyl hopes the agreement produces a significant increase of the presence and penetration of its nanotubes on the European market within the segments of plastics, rubber, paints and coatings.

Nanocyl products are available in the form of powders, pellets, liquid dispersions and films. The company’s brand-name pre-dispersed carbon nanotube-based solutions are PlastiCyl, EpoCyl, AquaCyl and ThermoCyl.

May 8, 2007 — SEMI, the global semiconductor industry association, has been keeping a spreadsheet of who’s doing what in nanotechnology that will impact the electronics and energy industries specifically. And now, the association is making this internal tool available to members.

“We don’t pretend this is the complete list of all companies worldwide involved in nanoelectronics and nanoenergy, but in our efforts to meet the needs of our growing nanotech membership, we have put considerable time and effort into tracking who these folks are and what they do,” the organization says.

“We’ve concentrated on tracking new players and new technologies, primarily start-ups and smaller companies, or those from outside the electronics sector, that are using nanoscale materials’ unique properties in new ways, in products that use electrons. This means we haven’t included the big names in mainstream semiconductors and semiconductor equipment and materials, even though they are driving major developments in evolutionary nanoscale processing.”

May 7, 2007 — NanoDynamics, Inc. a diversified nanotechnology and manufacturing company, announces that it has filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering of shares of its common stock. The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the offering have not yet been determined.

NanoDynamics intends to use a portion of the net proceeds from the offering for capital equipment and expansion of its manufacturing capabilities, research and development, and sales and marketing activities. The company will use the remaining net proceeds for general corporate purposes.

Jefferies & Company, Inc. is acting as the sole book-running manager of the offering.

The company has also launched TechBank, a forum offering information on a selection of its intellectual property available for sale, licensing, partnering, or joint development.

Located within NanoDynamics’ NDInnovations group web portal, TechBank offers a downloadable description of each item. The first 13 of these technologies are available for review now; several are expected to be added each quarter. The technologies typically fall into one of four stages of development: developed (ready for scale-up and commercialization, and protected by issued patents), intermediate (secured through published or applied patents, prototypes demonstrated), nascent (IP disclosure, developed prototype), and theoretical.

“Unlike other ‘IP stores’ that use a third-party brokering system, TechBank offers the ability for those interested in our intellectual properties to work directly with our internal experts,” said Dr. Alan Rae, vice president of ND Innovations.

May 7, 2007 — The U.K.-based Midatech Group Ltd., a company devoted to production and application of nanoparticles for therapeutic and diagnostic applications, has opened its specialist design and manufacturing facility for cGMP (current good manufacturing practice)-grade nanoparticles in Bilbao, Spain. The company says Midatech Biogune S.L. is the world’s first cGMP-grade plant for the production of nanoparticles at a scale commensurate with pharmaceutical applications.

The plant will initially focus on the design and manufacture of nanoparticles to supply Midatech Group’s series of projects applying nanotechnology for therapeutic purposes. These include using nanoparticles as scaffolds for synthetic vaccines and antibiotics, as drug delivery vehicles for RNAi drugs and drugs able to cross the blood-brain barrier, as well as targeted cancer treatments and imaging agents. Midatech says its nanoparticles will allow drug companies to deliver new and existing medicines at significantly lower doses and with greater specificity, thereby reducing toxicity.

In addition to in-house product development, Midatech is prepared to license this IP to pharmaceutical and diagnostic development partners while retaining manufacturing rights. The company has exclusive world-wide rights for technology relating to the synthesis and applications of self-assembling nanoparticles.

Midatech says its biocompatible nanoparticles possess a number of unique properties that make them ideal for therapeutics, diagnostics and other enabling applications, including water solubility, and ability to present multiple ligands (allowing for multivalent drug or multi-drug delivery on a single particle).

May 4, 2007 — NaturalNano, Inc., a materials science company, has entered into a joint development agreement (JDA) with Cascade Engineering, a developer and manufacturer of plastics products. This is the second JDA that NaturalNano has announced in the second quarter of 2007.

The new partnership will center on commercializing NaturalNano’s Pleximer products for a range of industries. Pleximer, a turn-key nanocomposite additive, promises a substantial impact on the properties of polymer composites, namely enabling the development of stronger, lighter materials. NaturalNano says that Pleximer is a low-cost alternative for the polymer nanocomposites market, which is the fastest growing segment of the polymer composites industry. The segment is predicted to more than double in size from $300M today to $740M by 2010.

Both NaturalNano and Cascade Engineering anticipate applications in numerous products, leading to utilization of filled halloysite nanotubes (HNT) to develop materials with functionality such as flame retardance and antimicrobial properties. The companies’ joint development collaboration is an important benchmark in Pleximer’s development timeline, says NaturalNano.

Over the last several months, NaturalNano demonstrated the production of polypropylene and nylon Pleximer on a pilot and manufacturing scale. The resulting materials exhibited excellent dispersion and improved the mechanical properties of the polymer. The highly concentrated Pleximer product would be added to pure polymer in the final molding process by Cascade Engineering to obtain nanocomposite materials with the desired properties for a wide-range of applications.

NaturalNano and Cascade Engineering now plan to pursue jointly developed accreditation testing, application definitions and formula optimization that will be used in the pilot and manufacturing processes to produce Pleximer-based nanocomposites for multiple polymer systems.


Trillions of holes create insulating vacuums around nanowires. (Photo: IBM)

May 4, 2007 — IBM claims the first-ever application of self-assembling nanotechnology to conventional chip manufacturing. The company says it has harnessed the natural pattern-creating process that forms seashells, snowflakes, and tooth enamel to form trillions of holes and thereby create insulating vacuums around the miles of nano-scale wires packed next to each other inside each computer chip.

IBM researchers say the electrical signals on such chips can flow 35 percent faster, or the chips can consume 15 percent less energy, compared to the most advanced chips using conventional techniques.

“The IBM-patented self-assembly process moves a nanotechnology manufacturing method that had shown promise in laboratories into a commercial manufacturing environment for the first time, providing the equivalent of two generations of Moore’s Law wiring performance improvements in a single step, using conventional manufacturing techniques,” the company asserts.

This new form of insulation, commonly referred to as “airgaps” by scientists, is a misnomer, as the gaps are actually vacuums, absent of air. The self-assembly process enables the nano-scale patterning required to form the gaps; this patterning is considerably smaller than current lithographic techniques can achieve.

A vacuum is believed to be the ultimate insulator for wiring capacitance, which occurs when two conductors, in this case adjacent wires on a chip, sap energy from one another, generating heat and slowing data transmission.

Until now, chip designers often were forced to fight capacitance issues by pushing ever more power through chips, creating a range of undesireable side effects. They have also used insulators with better insulating capability, but these insulators have become tenuously fragile as chip features shrink.

The self-assembly process already has been integrated with IBM’s manufacturing line in East Fishkill, New York and is expected to be fully incorporated in IBM’s manufacturing lines and used in chips in 2009. The chips will be used in IBM’s server product lines and thereafter for chips IBM builds for other companies.

“This is the first time anyone has proven the ability to synthesize mass quantities of these self-assembled polymers and integrate them into an existing manufacturing process with great yield results,” said Dan Edelstein, IBM Fellow and chief scientist of the self-assembly airgap project.

Edelstein led the IBM team that invented the technique to use copper wiring in computer chips instead of aluminum, now a standard method for producing chips, ushering in a decade of chip innovations from the IBM labs that transformed how chips were built and used across many industries and applications.

May 3, 2007 — FEI Company, provider of instruments for nanoscale imaging, analysis and prototyping, reported increases in revenue, earnings and cash for Q1 2007. Net sales and earnings were the highest for any quarter in the company’s history, and quarterly bookings were the second-highest and the largest first-quarter total ever.

Net sales for the quarter ended April 1, 2007 of $148.0 million were up 5% compared to the fourth quarter of 2006 and up 32% compared to the first quarter of 2006.

“The year has started out on track,” said Don Kania, FEI’s president and CEO, “as we continued to demonstrate progress in several strategic areas — ramping revenue, improving gross margins, and building our presence in Asia. Bookings continued to be solid and within our expected range, and we increased shipments to bring the book-to-bill ratio closer to 1 to 1. Our gross margin improved to 43.1%, reflecting increased volume and improved revenue mix. Bookings from Asia including Japan increased 59% from last year’s first quarter and 45% from the fourth quarter. The company also increased its total cash and investment position during the quarter by $19.7 million, due to continued profitability and employee stock option exercise proceeds.”

FEI expects net sales for the Q2 2007 to be in the range of $145 million to $152 million. Bookings are expected to be in line with revenue and earnings per share are expected to be in the range of $0.32 to $0.37 per share.