Tag Archives: Small Times Magazine

April 14, 2006 – Novaled and Ciba Specialty Chemicals announced an industrial collaboration in the field of OLED materials. Ciba Specialty Chemicals will produce the organic dopant and transport materials developed by Novaled.

Ciba will produce the materials using its know how in the synthesis of organic materials, whereas Novaled will continue to market the materials. The two companies will also collaborate in the development of future OLED products and platforms based on Novaled’s technology and materials.

April 13, 2006 — NanoMaterials Technology Pte Ltd, a Singapore company that develops and commercializes production technologies for nanomaterials, opened its new $1.54 million facility officially on Monday.

The company was founded in 2000 and currently has 20 employees. It counts amongst its customers 3M and Weyerhaeuser from the U.S., BASF from Germany and other multinational companies from Europe and Japan, according to a news release.

It recently concluded a funding round, bringing its total funding to date to $7.7 million. A new laboratory, which includes a GMP facility and pharmaceutical and chemical laboratories, has been set up and the company says it is looking to boost its R&D headcount to 30.

The company said its technology for the production of nano-precipitated calcium carbonate, the first nanomaterial developed by the company, has been out-licensed to several companies for industrial production. The material has also been used in nano-composite development and in the paper industry.

NanoMaterials Technology has also developed electronic materials and has worked on several nano-drug compounds in solid oral form and for inhalation delivery and is actively targeting the pharmaceutical and drug delivery industry.

April 13, 2006 — Richardson Electronics announced a global distribution partnership with TeraVicta Technologies of Austin, Texas, to distribute its complete line of MEMS-based RF switching solutions.

The switches are designed to provide the low insertion losses, high isolation, and high linearity of electromechanical relays, with the size, power consumption, and production advantages of high-volume, wafer-fabricated, solid state switches.

Chris Marshall, vice president of Richardson’s wireless and broadband communications business unit, said in a prepared statement that preliminary investigations have yielded interest from large instrumentation and infrastructure manufacturers.

April 13, 2006 – JMAR Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ: JMAR), a developer of laser technology for nanotech, biotech and semiconductor applications, named Neil Beer its new president and chief executive officer. In addition, Charles Dickinson, who has served on the company’s board since 2001, has been elected the new chairman.

Beer has been a director for the past 15 years. He is a Air Force General and business executive with experience developing and commercializing defense and industrial software and process control technologies. He replaces Ron Walrod, who held the position since October 2002.

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April 12, 2006 — Imago Scientific Instruments Corp., a Madison, Wis., maker of atom probe tomography tools, announced on Tuesday that it has acquired Oxford nanoScience Ltd., a UK-based competitor, from Polaron plc.

The deal, which was for a total of $4.35 million, includes $2.25 million in cash and the issue of $2.1 million in preferred stock, according to a Polaron regulatory filing with the London Stock Exchange, where its stock is listed. The stock will be issued in stages, starting with $1.5 million at completion of the deal, $500,000 after 12 months and the rest after 18 months. Polaron makes control systems for a variety of markets and had operated Oxford nanoScience as its nanotechnology division.

“We are very excited about this acquisition and the contributions it will make to our business going forward,” said Timothy Stultz, Imago president and CEO, in a prepared statement. He said he believed that combining Oxford’s technology, products, intellectual property and atom probe team with those of Imago would strengthen the company’s ability to deliver better tools.

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Atom probe tomography tools are used to generate a three-dimensional map of a sample of material. Imago’s tools excite the material sample with an electric field, which causes the atoms to peel off and be pulled toward a detector. The time-of-flight and position on the detector of each atom tells the system what kind of atom it was and where in the material it was located. For example, the tool can be used to examine the distribution of metals in an alloy in order to correlate nanoscale patterns with macroscale phenomena.

Since the tools can be used to analyze a wide variety of materials, the company is specifically targeting them for metrology and analysis in the semiconductor, data storage and advanced materials markets.

Joe Stelzer, chief executive of Polaron plc, said in a prepared statement that he believed that combining the two companies’ technologies together would result in the atom probe being adopted as a tool of choice by the semiconductor industry. Polaron will now concentrate on running its controls business, which provides systems for lighting products, building systems and other applications.

April 11, 2006 – NanoInk Inc., a Skokie, Ill.-based maker of nanotech tools for manufacturing, development and other applications, named four new executives.

The company appointed JoAnne Smith Joyce as senior vice president and general counsel, Jim Whittle as vice president of business development, Bruce Dudzik as senior director of business development, and Tom Levesque as senior director of DPN global sales.

Joyce will head all legal activities, including management of the company’s intellectual property strategy and transactional work. She will also manage outside counsel. Most recently, she worked at Great Lakes Chemical Corp., where she was vice president and general counsel for its performance chemicals division.

Whittle was previously at AT Kearney, where he was a member of the global healthcare/life sciences sector team. Dudzik was previously at Affymetrix and Levesque was at SYNOVA.

April 10, 2006 – Nanophase Technologies Inc., a developer of nanomaterials and advanced nanoengineered products, announced the initial order for a new application for industrial UV and antimicrobial protection for the transportation and marine markets.

The company said the application success is a result of collaborative efforts between Nanophase and an unnamed company. Ed Ludwig, Nanophase vice president of business development, said in a prepared statement that the core of the success in such new applications is the company’s ability to manipulate and disperse its nanoparticles.

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April 10, 2006 — By his own admission, MEMS industry veteran Kurt Petersen didn’t think MEMS resonators were a viable commercial product. For starters, moisture would eventually creep into the packaging, undermining performance. And to make matters worse, the packaging itself would make it difficult if not impossible to compete in a price-driven market.

“I think I built some of the first MEMS resonators in the 1970s,” Petersen said. “I never thought they would be competitive with quartz.”

But that was then. This is now. And in the interim Petersen has been working with the crew at SiTime Corp., a company he founded to commercialize the technology after another industry veteran, Joe Brown, introduced him to some innovative processing and packaging techniques. Today SiTime announced it is sampling its SiT1xxx-series and SiT8002 MEMS oscillator families. The tiny oscillators generate frequencies between 1 to 125 MHz.

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The initial product families use QFN-type packages within which are a CMOS driver IC and a MEMS resonator. The complete oscillator product measures 2 x 2.5 x 0.85 mm.

The company says they are are intended to compete with quartz oscillators in electronic products like digital still cameras, portable media players and notebook computers. Although they offer distinct advantages over quartz — they are significantly smaller, the devices are tunable, and the company claims a variety of performance improvements, such as less susceptibility to shock and vibration — what ultimately makes them competitive with quartz is price.

This was achieved not so much by MEMS engineering as by an innovative approach to packaging in what SiTime calls its “MEMS First” process.

“One of the things you worry about is if you have MEMS on top (of a wafer) you can’t seal it at a high enough temperature to keep the moisture out,” Petersen said. “We encapsulate and anneal at 1,000 degrees Celsius.”

Rather than build the MEMS structures on top of a fully processed silicon wafer and then cover them with caps or some other type of package, SiTime builds its resonators on top of an SOI (silicon on insulator) wafer and covers them with an epitaxial layer of silicon — the net result being that the MEMS structures are within the wafer. And the wafer itself is the de facto package.

The ability to seal them at high heat creates a more effective barrier to moisture but it also offers other advantages. For example, the resulting wafer, with its MEMS structured buried inside, can then go through CMOS processing for a fully integrated MEMS and CMOS on a single chip for applications where a very low profile would be required. (The current samples are two-chip solutions because the amount of wafer real estate required for the CMOS and the MEMS are not equal, hence it’s cheaper to process two wafers.)

The company says its innovative packaging solution is one of the reasons it can compete with quartz on price. Another reason is that the MEMS chips are digital components and don’t require the signal conditioning chips required by traditional quartz oscillators, which eliminates additional cost. The company says using its oscillators is merely a matter of swapping out quartz for MEMS in a design since it has made the oscillators to fit within existing specs for quartz.

Finally, say company executives, the ability to provide smaller oscillators could be a boon to makers of cell phones and other portable electronic devices like digital music players or even such mundane things as the key fobs used to lock and unlock cars.

The MEMS First processing technology is licensed from Bosch, where it was originally developed. SiTime holds a license for using the process to make oscillator products, while Bosch retains rights for other uses. Bosch is a leading maker of MEMS products such as gyros, accelerometers and other types of sensors.

The company claims it can currently compete with about 80 percent of the traditional quartz market, though some applications aren’t yet viable. For example, Petersen acknowledged that the company’s technology cannot yet compete with the highest end of the quartz oscillator market, specifically those that are used as signal references in cellular telephones (though there are plenty of other uses in phones). But, he said, it’s only a matter of time.

April 7, 2006 — Advance Nanotech Inc. (OTC.BB: AVNA), a provider of financing and support services to expedite the commercialization of nanotechnology discoveries, announced that Joe Parkinson has been appointed non-executive chairman. Parkinson will assume the role from Lee Cole, who has stepped down, but will continue to serve as a director of the company.

Parkinson has served in past leadership positions at a number of technology companies, including as CEO of 8×8 Inc. He is chiefly known as the co-founder of semiconductor manufacturer Micron Technology. Parkinson served as president and then chairman and CEO of Micron for many years, beginning with the company’s inception.

April 6, 2006 – Australian bio-nanotech company pSivida Ltd. (Nasdaq: PSDV) announced it entered into an evaluation agreement with an undisclosed large medical device company to evaluate cardiovascular delivery of drugs using pSivida’s drug delivery technologies.

The agreement follows the company’s announcement in January that it had signed evaluation agreements with various companies, including large global pharmaceutical companies, to evaluate pSivida’s platform technology for their developmental compounds.