The Small Times’ university survey included 26 questions about funding, facilities, patenting, company formation, research, publishing, plus micro- and nano-specific courses and degree programs. It also gave respondents the opportunity to write in which of their peer institutions they thought were leaders in small-tech research and commercialization.

This year for the first time we asked respondents to consider institutions across the globe-not just in the United States. Although no non-American institutions received enough write-in votes to make it into the Top 10 lists, several did register. Delft University of Technology, in the Netherlands, is worthy of particular note. It received the most votes of non-American schools, and in fact, garnered recognition in all four peer-ranked categories. Perhaps the following comment, included in a press release issued by Delft in 2005, demonstrates why the institution is so widely regarded: “Nanotechnology has long lost its status as a buzzword. It is now part of our everyday vocabulary.” Delft seems to have been ahead of its time.

Following are the results. Note that some universities made the peer rankings, but do not appear at all in the survey rankings; those universities did not respond to the survey or else they provided incomplete information.

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The following list includes all the universities that responded to the Small Times’ survey and summarizes their micro- and nanotech programs. The list highlights some key centers, but is not comprehensive. Please visit each university’s Website for more information. Universities listed in bold ranked among the top 10 in one or more categories according to Small Times’ analysis, and thus are described in more detail in the main section of the article, which begins on p. 19. See the sidebar, “Top 10, by category,” on p. 30 for top-10 rankings in all categories.

Click here to download a PDF of the University index.

What’s the biggest barrier to small-tech commercialization today? Is it a lack of standards? Manufacturing or infrastructure challenges? Shortage of a qualified workforce? Intellectual property or EH&S (environmental, health, and safety) concerns?

No matter which of these issues you choose as the “right” answer, lack of global perspective is impeding its solution.

Recent trips to Helsinki (Nanotech Northern Europe), Chicago (Chicago Nano Forum), and NYC (NanoBusiness Alliance Conference) opened my eyes to the gap in understanding of who is doing what and where.

Although I was impressed with the range of attendees at Nanotech Northern Europe-and the range of initiatives being driven within and among European countries-the dearth of North American and Asian attendees disappointed me. There was a strong Chinese delegation and a couple of American exhibitors, but attendees were mainly from Europe and Russia.

While I understand that Nanotech Japan provides perhaps the best international exhibit platform, my travels have not taken me to a truly global conference, which means many efforts at solving commercialization challenges aren’t getting maximum visibility. Researchers and developers around the world are moving at such a fast pace that there doesn’t seem to be time to investigate what our neighbors are doing. Granted, conferences are not the only solution to information sharing, but they are a good indicator-and the value of face-to-face interaction cannot be matched.

Enabling a more global view of small tech can impact three key issues: government support, intellectual property, and a coordinated response to EH&S concerns.

Mobilizing government support

The small-tech community depends on governments for three critical things: money, policy, and regulations. Money is needed for R&D, infrastructure, and small business promotion. Policy determines where the money goes, and regulations provide a set of rules to play by.

Unfortunately, there are pressures on members within the U.S. government to show a rapid investment return in a timeframe similar to that demanded by venture capitalists. And we know how that has turned out for nano start-up capital: Not well.

Are we sufficiently patient to keep funding nanotechnology growth? That’s not clear at this point. As Sam Angelos, vice president of technology development at Hewlett-Packard, aptly notes, “Nano is a marathon, not a sprint.” Although groups such as the NanoBusiness Alliance, Foley & Lardner, and KL Gates are trying to communicate nanotechnology industry needs and progress to our government representatives, this is hardly a one- or two-organization job.

How are other nations viewing their commitments to nanotechnology growth? I’ve been told the U.S. and Japan programs are starting to fall behind. Is this an accurate assumption? How will the global competitive technology landscape be affected by policies made today? These are questions difficult to answer in a vacuum.

Intellectual property

Current challenges are fostering the need for patent and IP law professionals. We have avoided bloody IP wars because we have thus far lacked commercial products worth fighting over. However, an increase this year in product announcements and commercial partnerships indicates that situation won’t last for long. The Canon/Nano-Proprietary battle is just the beginning-and that case seems relatively simple. Who has the right to those nanotubes? Anyone?

The need for global protection in a world where the latest small-tech advances can come from almost anywhere makes deciding on an IP strategy complex and risky. How do we help our companies get the information and protection they need at a cost they can afford?

Toxicity, safety, and coordinated response

Better coordination on EH&S would do our whole ecosystem a lot of good. The question isn’t just about understanding what tests are being done and how to interpret their data-although that is critical. Rather, it is about sharing the resulting intelligence. A considerable amount of safety research is being done in China, but access to that data, in a form that can be understood, presents a problem.

Risk perception must also be managed. Government/industry collaborations, cross-agency initiatives, industry-lead consortiums, and for-profit certificates of “safety” standards in both Europe and the U.S. are all trying to address the issues of risk and perceived risk. As an industry based in science, we tend to believe logic will rule if we provide enough data and explain the risks and benefits in detail. But as University of Wisconsin professor Dietram Scheufele (see his blog at nanopublic.blogspot.com) demonstrated in his presentation at the Chicago Nano Forum, it is important to frame the issue, not just explain the science.

Patti Glaza is vice president and publisher at Small Times. She can be reached at [email protected].

By Tom Cheyney

As the first commercial flexible electronics reach consumers, many significant manufacturing and technological obstacles must be overcome for the market to reach its multi-billion-dollar potential over the next five to ten years. Pioneering efforts by Polymer Vision, Plastic Logic, Nanoident (see “Nanoident opens facility for organic semiconductors,” page 41), and other companies signal the first moves from the lab or pilot-line stage to volume production.

Polymer Vision, which spun off from Philips in late 2006, has announced it will ramp up a Southampton, U.K., manufacturing facility (in partnership with Innos) for its ultra-thin-film transistor polymer display modules. The company has also entered into an agreement with Telecom Italia to “bring the ‘cellular book’ to market.” Models of what the company touts as the “world’s first commercial rollable display product” were unveiled at the 3GSM World conference in Barcelona in February.

Edzer Huitema, Polymer Vision’s CTO, says a blend of refurbished and new AMLCD equipment will be deployed, as well as a proprietary lamination/delamination tool, in its Class 100 production facility (scheduled to come on line later this year). He adds that they have achieved field-effect mobility and driving voltages comparable to those of conventional TFT devices. Yields appear to be sustainable throughout the process flow, and defect sources, which are “comparable to those found in LCD manufacturing,” are “under control.” Ongoing quality-control work at Polymer Vision is focusing on materials purity and various types of insulator layers, according to Huitema.

Polymer Vision provides a five-inch display in Readius, a product the size of a cell phone.Click here to enlarge image

Bolstered by a recent funding round of $100 million, Plastic Logic plans to build and equip a green-field factory site in Dresden, says Simon Jones, VP of product development. The company expects to have “product-quality modules” of its “take anywhere, read anywhere…thin, light, robust e-paper displays” by mid-2008, with a production target of more than 1 million 10-inch-equivalent units for 2009.

Plastic Logic’s direct-write, room-temperature process requires no mask alignment and can be scaled to a large substrate size, says Jones. The company “measures contrast and yield on every panel” and has “captured a huge amount of defect data,” which is “essential for the move from R&D to production.”

For the emerging flexible thin-film, organic, and printed electronics markets to flourish, most industry professionals agree that roll-to-roll (R2R) processing must be implemented on the factory floor. Indeed, thin-film photovoltaics, OLEDs, and RFIDs are already in pilot or volume production using R2R techniques.

But for the manufacturing of large-area and conformable displays, paperlike e-books, and high-performance solid-state lighting to take place, it remains an open question whether inkjet, thermal laser imaging, or other printing technologies; optical, imprint, or digital lithography; adapted semiconductor and LCD processing methods; inorganic or organic material; or a combination of the various methodologies and chemistries will be leveraged into successful, scalable R2R approaches.

Why R2R? The main reason is cost, which must be cut by at least 50% compared with batch-processed components, according to DisplaySearch’s vice president, Barry Young. Hans Maidhof, senior product manager at Applied Materials, echoes the cost-cutting sentiment, saying that “flex will only succeed if it’s cheaper.”

Maidhof says, “Thin films reduce the cost of semiconductor materials, continuous fabrication increases utilization and reduces production costs, and application of industrial processes simplifies production while providing high manufacturing rates. …R2R [also] leverages form factor to lower overall customer costs.”

The challenges that face those trying to commercialize continuous processing are cultural as well as technical. “R2R and Web-converting folks are not used to semiconductor requirements and vice versa,” says Carl Taussig, program manager at Hewlett-Packard Labs. “We pretty much build everything, and building [your own] tools slows development.”

Included among the equipment that Taussig and his team have built is the self-aligned imprint lithography (SAIL) system.

This high-resolution tool, along with stamping, mastering, and other proprietary technologies, has allowed HP (with its partner PowerFilm Solar) to build what he claims is “the first flexible TFTs and [active-matrix] backplanes made fully with R2R processes.”

A seventh-generation dry-process, maskless production tool for printing thermal color filters resides “at a customer site in Asia for evaluation,” according to Eran Elizur of Kodak’s graphic communications group. The system handles 2250 x 2250mm substrates, employs five 5-micron-resolution laser heads, has 3-micron imaging accuracy with an imaging speed of up to 2 meters per second, and supposedly decreases manufacturing costs per panel by 30%.

For R2R processes to be consistent, efficient, and high-yielding, there must be reduced contamination and defectivity levels, precise endpoint control, very high uniformity, subnanometer-level surface roughness, and assured reliability.

Applied’s Maidhof admits that, although his company has a cleanroom-compatible vacuum web coater system, the “particle issue is most important” and “not totally solved in our tools.”

“With an endless process, where’s the endpoint?” quips Taussig of HP Labs. For their amorphous-silicon TFT process, his group uses interferometry to assess the endpoint of back-channel etching and fluorescence techniques to monitor and control the thickness of the polymer mask etch.

“Surface roughness is still an issue with flex and is not good enough for making transistors,” explains Bob Street, senior research fellow at Palo Alto Research Center. The roughness average needs to be a few angstroms, but that plastic substrates remain “five to ten times rougher than glass.” Pointing out the susceptibility of flexible substrates to scratching, Street says the plastics people “need to learn how to improve quality.”

Dan Gamota, director of printed electronics group at Motorola, believes the key challenge facing printed electronics is “how to [perform] quality control and characterization [tests] on rolls many hundreds or thousands of feet long. …How do you check individual transistor device mobility on 2,000 feet of film?” (Motorola has produced “more than 60 miles of printed electronics” and is “close to getting dielectric layers 1 to 5 microns thick.”)

Display Search’s Young points out the limitations of current R2R technology: “Do you have a process where a particular display is going to stay constant from roll to roll? There’s not a lot of flexibility in roll-to-roll manufacturing.”

Tom Moore, a nanotechnology blogger, has set up a Machine Phase blog at http://machine-phase.blogspot.com to chronicle his nanotechnology adventures designing molecular machines using NanoEngineer-1 software from Nanorex. The software is a 3D molecular engineering program that includes a sophisticated CAD module for the design and modeling of atomically precise components and assemblies, and a molecular dynamics module for simulating the movement and operation of mechanical nanodevices.

If you go to http:/machine-phase.blogspot.com/2007_03_01_archive.html and click on the picture of this bearing and shaft designed by Moore, it will open a new window with some animation of its turning. Photo by Tom MooreClick here to enlarge image

Moore’s journey to design a molecular machine started on March 3, 2007, when he constructed a molecular bearing in about an hour. What’s interesting is that he used “his trusty old Toshiba laptop” to do so. Designing his own machine required construction of speed reduction gear, which took more than 100 hours to simulate, with many trials and tribulations along the way. Moore also built large output gear, as well as pinion gear and a “shaft,” which he depicts in still shots or animation.

-Marcy Koff

In March, Nanoident opened in Linz, Austria, what it claims to be “the world’s first dedicated manufacturing facility for printed organic semiconductors.” The company started building its organic fab (OFAB) in late 2005. Located on Nanoident’s headquarters campus, it measures 850 square meters (9,150 sq. ft.) and includes 250 sq. meters (2,700 sq. ft.) of Class 100 cleanroom.

Rather than using traditional chipmaking techniques, the company employs an advanced inkjet-printing process, which can deposit specialized inks onto flexible and rigid substrates, including various polymers, glass, and silicon. The current process can print feature sizes down to the tens of microns on 30 x 30-cm-square substrates as thin as 20 microns, with film thickness of about 300nm for a typical four-layer device, says Wasiq Bokhari, CEO of the company’s U.S. subsidiary, Bioident.

“We work with different kinds of inks, to get different properties and sensitivities,” he explains. “We can add carbon nanotubes or other nanomaterials, and mix and match to create more-complex structures to make highly customized, highly specific semiconductors. You can design a new application and have it volume-manufactured in a very short time, in a matter of hours or days. It opens the whole idea of just-in-time production.”

A technician at Nanoident’s new OFAB performs substrate cleaning, a key manufacturing step.Click here to enlarge image

With output volumes for the initial production line in the thousands of square meters per year, the company’s goal is to hit 100,000 sq. meters within a year. Ultimate capacity could reach 100,000 sq. meters per hour, once OFAB transitions from sheet-fed or batch processing to roll-to-roll (R2R) manufacturing, says Bokhari.

“One of the beauties of printed electronics is scalability.” Although the fab has one printer line, it “could have three to four lines and could be scalable by adding different lines or by changing the printer system. We have the flexibility to do both, depending on market demand.”

The company has been working diligently on process development and yields for the past three years, explains Bokhari. Yields are “very device-dependent” and are also a function of the “complexity of the whole system, not just the devices you’re printing but everything you’re printing around it, as well as the materials details-substrates, inks, the whole stack you’re building.”

“For each of the specific components-substrate, materials, specific devices-we’ve been working on all of these different combinations to get a good handle on what the yields are and how to improve them. As we ramp up into higher production levels, it will help us improve on yields because we will be tuning and optimizing the process.”

Bokhari says the company will deliver the products manufactured at OFAB to its internal family of subsidiaries, including Bioident’s offering of what he calls a “radically simplified” lab-on-a-chip solution: low-cost devices for mobile analyses and in-vitro diagnostics. – TC

Nanocoating kills bacteria and viruses

LaamScience is working to commercialize a covalent nanocoating that, when subjected to light, produces agents that have been shown to kill or inactivate virtually all viruses and most bacteria. The company’s coating combines a process that amplifies the number of reactive sites on the fiber surface and covalently attaches a light-activated antimicrobial agent. The methodology is similar to photodynamic therapy that has already found substantial use in treating HIV and various cancers. The coating inactivates with virtually all viruses and does not require customized formulations.

LaamScience plans to optimize the technology for specific market applications, including personal respirator filters (masks); hospital-oriented furnishings, supplies, and furniture; and HVAC air filtration systems.

The light-activated coating is catalytic in nature, and the antimicrobial agents are continuously produced as long as the surface is exposed to visible light. Light momentarily elevates the coatings to a higher energy state. The coating transfers this energy to form an activated antimicrobial agent with a lifetime of less than a microsecond. The coating is regenerative, and the self-decontaminating surface remains virtually virus-free as long as it is exposed to visible light.

Test data have demonstrated a 99.2% to 99.99% kill rate of Vaccinia virus (a close relative of the smallpox virus) and influenza viruses (see table) as well as Gram-positive bacteria under light conditions of relatively short exposure at normal light intensities. Because the antimicrobial agent generation and interaction with the virus or Gram-positive bacteria will only occur in close proximity to the surface, LaamScience believes that it will not be harmful to humans or other large organisms.

Studies are continuing to improve viral inactivation using more-effective coatings with less-intense light, expanding the types of virus and bacteria tested, and showing the antimicrobial activity and ruggedness of the coatings in real-world testing.

Chemical components of the coating are well-characterized and are known entities that lessen the probability of biological incompatibilities. Furthermore, the coating is permanently bonded to the textile surface and does not contain leeching compounds. All components are water soluble, which aids safe manufacturing conditions. Biocompatibility testing (cytotoxicity, skin irritation, and skin sensitization) is underway.

Inactivation results for four different coatings: After one hour, 80% of the influenza virus on untreated fabric was infective, while a 3 to 4 log reduction was shown on the surfaces labeled C – F with exposure to a tungsten visible light source.Click here to enlarge image

UC claims world record in long, aligned nanotube arrays

University of Cincinnati (UC) engineering researchers have developed a composite catalyst and optimal synthesis conditions for oriented growth of multi-wall carbon nanotube arrays. And UC says it now leads the world in the synthesis of extremely long, aligned carbon nanotube arrays.

Research by Vesselin Shanov and Mark Schulz, co-directors of the University of Cincinnati Smart Materials Nanotechnology Laboratory, along with Yun YeoHeung and students, led to the invention of the method for growing long nanotube arrays. The researchers-in conjunction with First Nano, a division of CVD Equipment Corp.-have used the method to produce 18mm nanotube arrays on their EasyTube System using a chemical vapor deposition (CVD) process.

In a regrowth experiment on a separate substrate, the researcher produced an 11-mm-long array, which they were able to later peel completely off the substrate. Without additional processing, the same substrate was reused for a successive growth that yielded an 8-mm-long array.

The substrate is a multi-layered structure; a composite catalyst forms on top of an oxidized silicon wafer. Creating it requires a cleanroom environment and thin-film deposition techniques that can be scaled up to produce commercial quantities. Nanotube synthesis is carried out in a hydrogen/hydrocarbon/water/argon environment at 750°C.

The achievement fuels hope that continuous growth of nanotubes in the meter length range is possible. CVD Equipment plans to continue its partnership with UC to bring this technology into full-scale production. UC is also partnering with another company to produce long arrays that can be spun into fibers. The research has implications for medical, aerospace, electronic, and other applications.

New math tool simplifies complex data-and may help explain heavy nuclei

Despite advances in experimental nuclear physics, the most detailed probing of atomic nuclei still requires plenty of theory. The problem is that using theory to make meaningful predictions requires massive datasets that tax even high-powered supercomputers.

Now researchers from Michigan State and Central Michigan universities report dramatic reduction in complexity and computation time-and that may help address one of today’s most important questions in nuclear physics: What is the structure of heavy atomic nuclei?

At the heart of this question is the difficulty in modeling any system with multiple particles that interact via nuclear forces. The key is correlation, the idea that some pairs of electrons are strongly linked and related. Scientists have long known that focusing on the behavior of nucleon pairs helps describe the entire atomic nucleus-but until now, no one had used coupled-cluster theory with heavy atomic nuclei.

The researchers first used their high-performance computing centers to solve the weeks-long task of describing Nickel-56, in effect generating a yardstick by which to measure their abbreviated model. Next they compared their energy and wave function data. They report that coupled-cluster theory produced near-identical results, and the time spent crunching the numbers-on a standard laptop-was often measured in minutes or even seconds.