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Mar. 27, 2007 — Nanophase Technologies, developer of nanomaterials and nanoengineered products, has been issued U.S. Patent No. 7,166,663, titled “Nanostructured Compositions.” The patent describes nanostructured polymeric compositions, containing micron-sized and nano-sized particulate materials, which display synergistic improvements in mechanical properties with significantly enhanced optical properties. Processes for manufacturing the nanostructured compositions are also patented.

Dr. Richard Brotzman, Nanophase’s vice president of R&D, said, “We regard this patent as seminal technology in the coating field and it is significant for the company and our partnership with ALTANA Chemie AG, one of the world’s leading suppliers of paint and plastic additives for coatings, printing inks and plastics. Substantially transparent, abrasion and wear-resistant nanoparticle coatings have numerous potential applications in many commercial markets. BYK-Chemie and Nanophase continue working to develop new products based on this patented technology for multiple applications in a variety of markets.”

Mar. 26, 2007 — Discera Inc., developer of MEMS-based oscillators, has completed a $17.5 million Series C round of funding led by Scale Venture Partners. Discera recently began shipping its first products for direct replacement of quartz crystal oscillators for timing components in electronics devices; the company will use the funds to support increased production, distribution and marketing.

Scale Venture Partners joins previous investors 3i, Partech International and Ardesta LLC; new investor Horizon Ventures also participated in the round. Jim Jones, Managing Director with ScaleVP, has joined Discera’s board of directors.

The company has also announced expansion of its distribution channel, with the addition of frequency control manufacturer ABRACON. With this move Discera says it has strengthened its channel to cover all key segments of the market. Discera breaks the estimated $1 billion oscillator market into four segments (multi-frequency; high performance; mid-range; and other, such as military, industrial and automotive), and says that with high performance partner Vectron and now industrial and commercial partner ABRACON, it has a strong presence in three. Discera has already established a worldwide channel with mid-range XO partners in Europe and Asia. ABRACON’s channels include some of the top distributors in North America, including Digikey Corporation, Electrosonic, Future Electronics, Mouser Electronics, Richardson Electronics, Allied Electronics, and Newark Electronics.

Discera says that quartz crystal is considered to be one of the final hurdles of Moore’s law of scalability. Discera began shipping its MOS1 oscillator after passing stringent reliability tests, with volume production starting in Q2 2007. Discera’s technology consists of a silicon MEMS resonator and an ASIC embedded within a conventional QFN plastic package or ceramic package. Discera has been sampling its product since last year. Key target applications for MEMS-based timing devices are PCs, DVD players, gaming consoles, set top boxes, camcorders, PDAs and cameras as well a variety of industrial products.

March 26, 2007 — Quantum Leap Packaging, Inc. (QLP), provider of air cavity packages for semiconductor assembly, has announced the availability of HermeTech, which it says is the industry’s first hermetic plastic package to meet JEDEC standards. With this release, the company is targeting advanced packaging applications such as image sensors, HB-LEDs, MEMS, LDMOS, and RF microwave devices.

QLP is manufacturing HermeTech plastic air cavity QFNs (quad flat no-lead packages) that maintain hermetic leak rates of less than 5×10-8 atm cc/s He, and pass full Mil Spec reliability tests. By combining its Quantech material technology and UltraSeal ultrasonic lid process, QLP has developed HermeTech QFNs that feature customizable properties, low moisture permeability and high temperature stability and promise true hermetic performance.

QLP says HermeTech combines the hermetic performance and reliability of ceramic packages with design flexibility and tailored material properties to solve longstanding packaging problems. “I see QLP’s breakthrough technology leading the next generation of semiconductor packaging,” says David Grooms, CEO of Quantum Leap Packaging.

Hermetic levels have never been achieved with organic materials, according to QLP.

March 26, 2007 — Arrowhead Research Corp. has formed a new wholly-owned subsidiary and has agreed to acquire the assets, as well as the name, of C Sixty, Inc. (C-60), a company pioneering the development of drugs based on buckministerfullerenes.

“The future of medicine lies in targeted delivery of therapeutics through nanotechnology,” said R. Bruce Stewart, Arrowhead’s Chairman. “Our experience and expertise in this area makes C-60 a great strategic complement to our other majority owned subsidiaries.”

Buckministerfullerenes, also known as fullerenes or buckyballs, are a highly structured, water soluble, nanoscale form of carbon, similar to carbon nanotubes, discovered by Richard Smalley, who received the Nobel Prize for his work in this area. The molecules allow drug designers the opportunity to attach therapeutic and targeting chemical groups in many configurations.

C-60 has secured and developed a strong patent position covering the strategic biomedical uses of fullerenes. Initially, the company will focus on the antioxidant activity of fullerenes. Arrowhead believes that drugs based on fullerene antioxidant molecules may have significant impact on several unsolved diseases, including Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, stroke, atherosclerosis, complications from diabetes and protection of bone marrow cells from cancer chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Solutions for any of these diseases could represent billion dollar annual market opportunities.

In December 2004, C-60 merged with CNI, which calls itself the world leader in the production of single-wall and other small-diameter carbon nanotubes. On March 22 Unidym acquired CNI.

Arrowhead Research Corporation is a publicly-traded nanotechnology company commercializing new technologies in the areas of life sciences, electronics, and energy. The company also operates two other majority owned subsidiaries commercializing nanotherapeutics. Calando Pharmaceuticals is a leading RNAi company specializing in the design and delivery of siRNA therapeutics. Insert Therapeutics is commercializing drug-delivery-enhanced small-molecule therapeutics and nucleic acids. Insert’s first anti-cancer drug candidate is in Phase I clinical trials.

Mar. 23, 2007 — The Institute for Food and Agricultural Standards has published a new report, An Issues Landscape for Nanotechnology Standards: Report of a Workshop. The document discusses critical issues surrounding five standards themes it says affect the growing nanotechnologies sector: (1) timing and standards-setting, (2) product vs. process standards, (3) international harmonization, (4) integration of operational standards, and (5) participation and transparency.

The report is available for free downloadeding from the IFAS web site.

KMPR 1000 promises to enable microplated structures not previously achievable. (Photo: MicroChem)

Mar. 23, 2007 — MicroChem Corp. , manufacturer of lift-off, MEMS, e-beam and other specialty resists, introduces two new products that together promise high aspect ratio imaging with vertical sidewalls, enabling the design of tall and dense micro plated structures not previously achievable.

The products are KMPR 1000, a high performance liquid resist that MicroChem developed in cooperation with Nippon Kayaku Corporation of Japan, and Remover K, an aqueous stripper system for KMPR 1000 removal. KMPR 1000 is an epoxy-based, negative-acting, high contrast, i-line sensitive photoresist that, when used with Remover K, enables aspect ratios up to 10:1.

KMPR 1000 can be coated onto a substrate at thicknesses from 4 microns to 100 microns with a single spin coating. It promises compatibility with conventional aqueous developers (0.26N TMAH or KOH) and solvent-based developers, such as SU-8 Developer. High chemical resistance and excellent adhesion make it suitable for use with a wide variety of electrolytic plating chemistries.

Although KMPR 1000 can be stripped in typical solvents such as NMP, Remover K is recommended to completely remove the resist, especially for high aspect ratio plating applications. Plasma removal is also possible.

According to Luc Oullet, P. Eng., Director, Technology Development at DALSA Semiconductor, “KMPR meets all of the requirements for MEMS processing, with its high throughput, excellent aspect ratio control (exceeding 7:1), wet strip capability and adhesion.”

Peter ten Berge, ASML, Special Applications, states that “The photosensitivity and high aspect ratio of KMPR is a MEMS technology enabler that never existed before under i-line illumination.”

KMPR 1000 is available in four viscosities for spin coat application and various package sizes from 500 ml to 20 liters.

By Charles Q. Choi, Small Times Contributing Editor

Image: Unidym

Mar. 22, 2007 — Nanotube manufacturer Carbon Nanotechnologies Inc. (CNI), co-founded by late Nobel Laureate and nanotube pioneer Richard Smalley, will merge with nanotube patent aggregator and product developer Unidym in Menlo Park, Calif.

Unidym has exclusive licenses to carbon nanotube patents from eight universities, including the California Institute of Technology, the University of California Los Angeles, Duke University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The combined company, known as Unidym, will also have exclusive licenses to all the intellectual property in CNI’s portfolio, for control of 59 U.S. issued carbon nanotube-related patents. The merger is expected to close in early April.

While Hyperion Catalysis in Cambridge, Mass., “controls the large-diameter multi-walled carbon nanotube landscape, Unidym will control the small-diameter carbon nanotube space,” asserts John Miller, vice president of business development at Arrowhead Research in Pasadena, Calif. Unidym is a majority-owned subsidiary of Arrowhead.

Unidym plans to begin selling transparent nanotube-based films in 2008 as replacements for indium tin oxide (ITO) in products such as touch screens and solar cells. While Unidym previously made carbon nanotubes for demonstration purposes, the merger will allow for mass production for commercial development of the ITO replacement.

The merger also enables Unidym to establish a program to license packages of patents covering carbon nanotube-based products. Such a “one-stop shop for licensing” would make previously scattered intellectual property available for product development, hopefully encouraging manufacturers to make new investments, Miller said.

CNI will “definitely benefit from this merger, since it was not able to penetrate the market as it hoped, and applications for carbon nanotubes didn’t materialize as quickly as they might have liked,” said Lux Research senior analyst Vahe Mamikunian in San Francisco. “And Unidym gains with CNI’s intellectual property, making it a more significant player.”

“We recognized that we were at a state in our growth where we needed to be nearer to downstream markets and thought Unidym was probably the farthest along in the electronics area, a high-value area we’re excited about,” said CNI president Bob Gower, who will take on a board member and advisor role in the merged company.

The merger will “really consolidate intellectual property from many diverse sources here, which will hopefully further speed up commercialization of carbon nanotube applications,” Mamikunian said. “This merger could also be the impetus for consolidation activity in the carbon nanotube space to accelerate.”

“There’s a need to get companies larger in the nanotech space. This does that. There’s a need to strengthen nanotech company intellectual property position. This does that. There’s a need to get to real in-use markets, and is a giant step forward for that,” Gower said.

The merger involves both assets and operations. Former CNI personnel will continue to work in Houston.

No investment bank assisted with the transaction. The Goodwin Proctor law firm represented Arrowhead; Gower said that as a matter of course CNI does not disclose its law firm in such matters.

Mar. 22, 2007 — Nanoliter, LLC has introduced what it calls “the world’s first non-touch nanoliter syringe.” The product is based on induction based fluidics (IBF) technology, which uses electric fields to launch liquids to targets (including humans, animals, plants, vials, beakers, microscope slides, and scientific instruments) using common liquids such as glycerin, some glues, and whole human blood. “This simple, low cost, inkjet-like technology, requires essentially no training,” the company asserts.

The benefits of operating in the nanoliter space include reducing solvent, waste disposal costs, and human exposure by factors of 1000 x. New routine liquid handling capabilities include a purported 10 x increase in MALDI sensitivity for analysis of proteins in proteomics work, which the company says will be reported at the annual meeting of the American Society of Mass Spectrometry in June, 2007.

Mar. 21, 2007 — Sensirion AG of Zurich, Switzerland, has announced its third-generation MEMS-based liquid flow sensors for microfluidic systems, designed for analytical instruments, medical devices, and life-science applications. On-chip integration promises reductions in cost, size, and weight.

The key “third generation” feature involves merging the sensor element with digital intelligence for linearization and temperature compensation on a single chip. Miniaturization techniques have enabled weight reduction to 6 grams.

The devices promise media detection and accurate measurement of very low liquid flow rates (nanoliters per minute), with millisecond response times to facilitate monitoring and controlling dynamic effects, and reliable repeatability. A patented design involving PEEK or fused silica (glass) channels enable complete isolation of liquid media.

The largest model is designed for flow rates up to 3 ml/min. in microfluidic systems.

The six-channel interface chip saves on cost, power consumption, and space. (Image: Sensor Platforms)

Mar. 21, 2007 — Sensor Platforms, developer of IC-based sensor interface products, has introduced the SSP1401 Multi-Channel LRC Sensor Interface chip, designed for high-volume applications where sensor fusion capability is vital. The company says its chip, which supports up to six sensors, is a natural fit for any battery powered mobile platform seeking to add more value by leveraging the capability of sensors.

The user-configurable chip interfaces with sensors of various signal types and functionalities including resistive, capacitive, inductive, piezoelectric and pulse-count based. For instance, the chip can directly interface to a magnetometer to implement a compass function, and at the same time provide altimeter information via a capacitive pressure sensor; both functions have become popular in wristwatches and other consumer devices.

The SSP1401 promises true 1.8V operation (1.6V to 3.6V), ultra-low power consumption, and cost effectiveness. Sensor Platforms says it has designed the product for industrial and automotive customers’ requirements for functionality over extended temperature ranges from -40 to +125C.

The SSP1401’s six channels can each drive up to 60 mA for any given sensor and are compatible with most sensor element types including MEMS. It requires only three discreet passive components aside from the sensor elements, and outputs sensor data using a standard interface SPI protocol for host-interface convenience.

The SSP1401 is available in a bare die form or in a 5 x 5 mm sq., 28-pin MLF/QFN package that is RoHS compliant. Packaged devices are priced at $2.24 each in 1000 unit quantities. Samples and evaluation kits will be available in Q2 2007. The evaluation kit will feature a simple capacitive touch scroll sensor demo, an ARM-7 processor-based USB communication board boasting 256 KBytes of code-space memory for user program development, and data-acquisition software tools that allow data-logging, graphing and statistical analysis.