Category Archives: Nanotech

Nanoencapsulation market is expected to grow at a growth rate of 7.80% in the forecast period 2020 to 2027. Nanoencapsulation market will witness stable growth rate over the forecast period with the emerging market in the forecast period of 2020-2027.

Company snapshot, geographical presence, product portfolio, and recent developments are taken into account for studying the company profiles. Nanoencapsulation market research report has the potential to convince strategic and specific needs of any business in the Nanoencapsulation market industry. Furthermore, this market report displays momentous data, current market trends, market environment, technological innovation, upcoming technologies and the technical progress in the related industry. Nanoencapsulation market is a professional and a meticulous market report which underlines primary and secondary drivers, market share, leading segments and geographical analysis.

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The major players covered in the Nanoencapsulation market report are Blue Shield of California, Frutarom Industries Ltd, Southwest Research Institute, Aquanova AG, Nano science and technology institute, Shenzahen Nanotech Port Co, among other domestic and global players. Market share data is available for Global, North America, Europe, Asia Pacific (APAC), Middle East and Africa (MEA) and South America separately. DBMR analyst understands competitive strengths and provides competitive analysis for each competitor separately.

Global Nanoencapsulation market research report displays an absolute outline of the market that considers various aspects such as product definition, customary vendor landscape, and market segmentation. Currently, businesses are relying on the diverse segments covered in the market research report to a great extent which gives them better insights to drive the business on the right track. The competitive analysis brings to light a clear insight about the Nanoencapsulation market share analysis and actions of key industry players. With this info, businesses can successfully make decisions about business strategies to accomplish maximum return on investment (ROI).

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Nanoencapsulation Market To Observe Exponential Growth during the forecast period with Various Competitors: Blue Shield of California, Frutarom...

The nanotechnology industry is growing at a rapid rate with numerous applications from healthcare to agriculture. Furthermore, with increasing government funding to encourage innovation, the industry holds solid growth prospects. So, we believe nanotech stocks Thermo Fisher Scientific (TMO), Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:), Applied Materials (AMAT), and BASF SE (OTC:) could be solid buys.Nanotechnology is a rapidly emerging technology with potential uses in many sectors, including healthcare, energy, and agriculture. For example, with the world facing its worst public health catastrophe in history, nanotech healthcare applications are helping create effective ways to identify, diagnose, treat, and prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

The increasing adoption of nanotechnology in medical diagnosis & imaging and other industries, and the emergence of self-powered nanotech devices are anticipated to drive the growth of the nanotechnology industry. Increasing government support should aid this growth. As a result, the global nanotechnology industry is expected to reach $33.63 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of $36.4%.

Given this backdrop, it may be prudent to bet on fundamentally sound nanotech stocks Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. (NYSE:), Intel Corporation (INTC), Applied Materials Inc. (NASDAQ:), and BASF SE (BASFY) as they are well-positioned to capitalize on the industrys growth.

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4 Stocks to Buy to Profit from the Growth in the Nanotechnology Market By StockNews - Investing.com

Govt should include nanotechnology as an interdisciplinary subject to the national agenda, say experts

There is no alternative to create opportunities for researchers to work as the country is on the verge of entering into the fourth industrial revolution, according to speakers at a webinar.

They were speaking at a webinar titled, Bangabandhu's Thought on Science and Technology organized by Bangladesh Nano Society (BNS) on Saturday.

Many of our world-class scientists and researchers are working as frontiers at different renowned global organizations. We want our government to make it a priority to include nanotechnology as an interdisciplinary subject to the national agenda, said Dr Md Tofazzal Islam, a professor and founding director of the Institute of Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering (IBGE), as the opening remarks.

One of the keynote speakers at the event Dr Senjuti Saha, scientist and director of Child Health Research Foundation, said: Nanotech is inevitable in scientific progress and transformations taking place in todays world. It has also played a big role in producing Covid-19 vaccines.

Speaking of Bangabandhus contribution to the countrys progress in science, this young researcher said: I dont know any other leaders in the contemporary world who thought about science the way Bangabandhu did. He always used to say - Research is power,

The Atomic Energy Commission was established in 1973 by the instruction of Bangabandhu, he allocated 265 acres of land just for research of nanotechnology in the same period. It is unimaginable that he thought about nanotech at that time, said Dr Saha.

Father of the Nation inaugurated the first artificial satellite of the country, just before he was murdered on August 15, 1975, she added.

Screenshot of the webinar

Dr Lutful Hassan, the vice-chancellor of Bangladesh Agricultural University, said: The base of agriculture could be stronger in the upcoming future, with the use of nanotechnology,

He also suggested that nanotechnology could be used to reduce the cost of pesticides, assessing soil conditions and new technologies that help farmers to reduce the time and cost to apply insecticides.

Attending the discussion as the chief guest, State Minister for Planning Dr Shamsul Alam, said: On the 8th Five-Year Plan, we are promoting a strong inclusion of research and technology as were standing on the verge of a fourth industrial revolution. I have already proposed to allocate 1% of our total GDP into research and innovation, which still requires approval.

Mentioning the successful implementation of nanotechnology in the desalination process of water in the southern region of the country, the state minister pointed out how tech can be used for the betterment of marginalized people.

Bangabandhu always used to bridge the gap between the needy and the providers. Even being in power for just four years, he drafted and implemented the first five-year plan of the country. Even now, my ministry does not lack planning; we are continuously trying to accommodate evidence-based policy decisions, the state minister said during the webinar.

On the demand of a dedicated institute for nanotechnology, the state minister responded positively.

I wholeheartedly support the idea of a dedicated institute for nanotechnology. It will not cost much. However, there are some procedures before passing it to the planning commission, Id urge you to go through that. Ill see to it personally, he said.

Pointing out the importance of nurturing good quality scientists and researchers, President of Bangladesh Nano Society Professor Al Nakib Chowdhury said: Our researchers are working on nanotech on their own, just for the sake of their passion. However, there is no alternative to patronizing our researcher to see a greater impact of nanotechnology in the nations progress. Id urge the minister to consider a proper remuneration for them.

The webinar was moderated by Dr Mohammad Mahbub Rabbani, general secretary of Bangladesh Nano Society (BNS).

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Speakers: Scientific researches imperative to utilize opportunities of 4th industrial revolution - Dhaka Tribune

GOLDEN, Colo., Sept. 9, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Syneffex provides patented solutions to an issue that is universal to facilities and factories around the world the need to protect personnel from the burn risks of hot equipment surfaces.

Dangerous equipment includes:

The generally recognized "safe touch" temperatureis 140F (60C) or below. Heat Shield EPX-H2O thermal insulating coating has the ability to bring a surface as hot as 400F down to 140F in just a matter of hours if coated while the surface is hot and it is impervious to moisture and dust, is highly chemical resistant, andit prevents corrosion of the underlying substrate.

Examples of results produced by these products include:

Stuart Burchill, CEO/CTO of Syneffex Inc. says, "Enough talk! Seeing is believing. Here's a video from the field that illustrates the eye-opening temperature reduction of our coating up close and personal. The uncoated steam pipe was 352F, and was reduced to safe touch in the course of just two hours."

Click below to see the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=90TjQBLspog

You can learn more here:https://www.syneffex.com/safe-touch-solutions-coatings/

About Syneffex Inc.

Syneffex Inc. provides products that improve energy efficiency and worker safety. The Company is a subsidiary of Industrial Nanotech Inc., which develops and commercializes new and innovative applications for nanotechnology.

Safe Harbor Statement

Safe Harbor Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995: This release includes forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that involve risks and uncertainties. The Company is not obligated to revise or update any forward-looking statements in order to reflect events or circumstances that may arise after the date of this release.

Syneffex™

SOURCE Syneffex Inc.

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Syneffex Provides Solutions That Reduce Burn Injuries and Increase Worker Safety in Factories - PRNewswire

Proactive investigates the new and exciting world of halloysite-kaolin, the little-known mineral with game-changing potential.

You may have heard of kaolin an industrial clayoften referred to as China Clay after its discovery more than 1,000 years ago.

Kaolin has a broad spectrum of applications and is most notably used as an additive in a wide range of everyday products, including paper, ceramics, paints and rubber.

New uses for kaolin continue to come to light, ensuring the material will garner strong global demand for years to come.

But its halloysite, a mineral thats part of the same subgroup of clay minerals as kaolinite, that has researchers (and investors) interested.

Halloysite is coming to the fore in specialised green technologies and other cutting-edge applications, exposing the material to lucrative and exciting new markets includingbatteries, supercapacitors,and cancer therapeutics.

It is now also highly sought after in the medical field for biomedical applications with uses for drug delivery, gene delivery, tissue engineering, cancer and stem cells isolation, and bioimaging.

Halloysites tubular microstructure naturally occurring hollow nanotubes that are imperceptible to the human eye make halloysite a unique mineral with highly desirable properties.

Features such as a high surface area to unit weight ratio, high porosity and differential charge capabilities between inner and outer surfaces have led researchers to discover its suitability in high-tech processes and end-uses such as carbon capture and conversion, hydrogen storage, water remediation and nanotechnology.

Pure kaolinite, hybrid kaolinite-halloysite and pure halloysite. Source: Minotaur Exploration.

What should get potential investors excited is that halloysite and hybrid halloysite-kaolin is far more valuable than regular kaolin, as well as the scarcity of large, commercial deposits of halloysite nanotubes.

Pure halloysite sells for up to US$5,000/tonne, compared to a kaolin/halloysite hybrid, which fetches between A$500 andA$1,000/tonne, and pure kaolin going for A$300/tonne.

One company looking to fill the gap in the market is (), an Australian exploration company that, in a joint venture partnership with (), ownsthe Great White Project.

Great White is described as a world-class deposit with a JORC estimated resource of 34.6 million tonnes, hosting rich quantities of both halloysite and kaolinite on the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia.

The resource at Great White includes 17.4 million tonnes of minus 45-micron quality kaolin product and contains two sub-domains: a halloysite zone of 15.9 million tonnes and an ultra-bright high-purity kaolin zone of 1.2 million tonnes.

In an interview with Proactive, Andromeda Metals managing director James Marsh said that while it has been difficult educating the Australian market about the product, theres been a recent surge in interest following work on new avenues to market.

Halloysite-kaolin refined noodles. Source: Andromeda Metals

Back in March, Andromeda and Minotaur signed a binding offtake agreement with Japanese porcelain manufacturer Plantan Yamada, which has factories in Japan and China.

The agreement covers 5,000 tonnes per annum of Great White CRM high-quality halloysite-kaolin, priced at A$700/tonne.

Nevertheless, in the fast-moving nanotechnology market, prices are exponentially higher.

According to Grand View Research, the nanotechnology space was worth US$8.5 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.1% from 2020 to 2027.

Natural Nanotech (NNT), a research vehicle jointly formed by Andromeda Metals and Minotaur Exploration, has spent the last few years looking into new and emerging applications for halloysite-kaolin nanotubes (HNT) with the University of Newcastles Global Innovation Centre for Advanced Nanomaterials (GICAN).

Marsh said: For pure halloysite itself, it will sell for about $5,000 per tonne and we are now working on research with Natural Nanotech, our joint venture company with Minotaur on new technologies for halloysite composites and there we are talking about several million dollars per tonne.

NNTs testing on halloysite-derived carbon nanomaterials has shown excellent absorption potential and recyclability for carbon capture and conversion purposes, with more than 1.1 tonnes of CO2 capture per tonne absorbent.

Minotaur non-executive director Tony Belperio said the scientists at GICAN were blown away when they came across the halloysite material from Great White.

They are used to dealing with carbon nanomaterials, which are very expensive to produce.

But if nanomaterials could be provided much more cheaply, then the market will explode.

Belperio said the Great White Kaolin Project containedthe greatest known global accumulation of halloysite nanotubes in variable admixtures of around 10% and 80% with kaolinite.

He said NNT was now asking: Can halloysite serve as a natural alternative for highly expensive and hazardous carbon nanotubes?

Research activity is underway with GICAN under two specific agreements:

The idea is to capture the carbon and strip it back off the nanotubes a bit like a swimming pool filter, Belperio said.

You would be passing all the gasses through, capturing the C02, backflushing it whenever it fills up and then refreshing the nanotubes numerous times until one day you might have to replace them.

Once the CO2 has been captured, the next step would be to convert it into a clean energy source such as methane or methanol.

Belperio added: Demand for this would be global and would come mostly from industrial users such as cement plants, refineries, brick plants and plasterboard factories these are the sort of companies looking for a method of capturing CO2 that is reasonably cheap and efficient.

A pilot carbon capture plant has been designed by Natural Nanotech and delivery is expected by November December 2021.

With the likes of Elon Musk encouraging the world to create the best carbon capture technology with a $100 million reward, the timing could not have been better.

The Great White Kaolin Project on the Eyre Peninsula, South Australia. Source: Andromeda Metals

Only a handful of ASX-listers have discovered commercially viable halloysite-kaolin resources, further proving why it is so rare.

() is undertaking a pre-feasibility study on its Cloud Nine resource at the Noombenberry Kaolin Halloysite Project in Western Australia after announcing a mineral resource estimate in May.

The Noombenberry project comprises 207 million tonnes of kaolinised granite, which includes separate domains of 123 million tonnes of bright-white kaolinite and 84 million tonnes of kaolin/halloysite bearing material.

(, ) acquired two large-scale kaolin-halloysite projects back in May the Holly Kaolin Project in Western Australia, where exploration is underway, and the White Knight Kaolin-Halloysite Project in South Australia.

Finally, ()s Gibraltar Project in South Australia recently returned a composite sample, grading 53% halloysite, as it works to establish an initial inferred JORC resource.

Read more:

Halloysite-kaolin: an emerging material with unique properties making it suitable for green-technology applications - Proactive Investors Australia

This press release is an English version of the previously published Swedish version, which has interpretive precedence.

Smoltek Nanotech Holding AB ("Smoltek") announces that the company has appointed Ellinor Ehrnberg as President of Smoltek Innovation AB, and she will assume this position on October 1. During the past year, Ellinor has held the position of business area manager of Smoltek Innovation, but she will now take on the role as President of the wholly owned group company.

During the past year, Ellinor has held the position of business area manager and Head of the wholly owned subsidiary Smoltek Innovation AB, and she has also been a part of Smoltek's management team. From October 1 2021, Ellinor will also fully assume the role as President of the group company. Smoltek thus secures valuable knowledge and experience within its continued efforts to create new technology innovations based on the company's patent-protected nanotechnology platform, where the development of completely new technology for electrolyzers is one of the leading areas for the company when it comes to interacting with the market.

"Ellinor has very broad experience from our type of processes, i.e. going from idea generation to development of new products and services in technology-intensive companies. The Board and I are therefore very pleased about the opportunity to hire her as President of Smoltek Innovation, thus securing her knowledge on a continuous basis, which will hopefully generate business for us in the electrolyzer area, as well as in other application areas", says Smoltek's interim CEO Marie Landfors.

"I am very pleased to be able to lead the exciting work of trying to take Smoltek's technology to new application areas. We see great potential in the hydrogen area, but as always in these early stages, we expect to encounter unknown technical challenges. It is therefore of great importance that we manage to build collaborations with strong partners, and it is in this dynamic that my experience will be essential for upcoming business agreements", says Ellinor Ehrnberg, incoming President of Smoltek Innovation AB.

About Ellinor EhrnbergEllinor has over 30 years of experience from various global roles in innovation, business development, strategy, company acquisitions, research, sales and business management - mainly with a focus on growth and new technology. She has a background from leading roles mainly within SKF, but also from Husqvarna, Mlnlycke Health Care, RISE and Arthur D Little. Ellinor holds a M.Sc. in Industrial Management Engineering from Chalmers. She also holds a M.Sc. in Robotics & Automation from Imperial College in London as well as a Ph.D. in Technology and Corporate Strategy from Chalmers.

About Smoltek InnovationSmoltek Innovation AB is a wholly owned subsidiary to Smoltek Nanotech Holding AB, focusing on further development, collaborations, financing, and licensing of application areas in industry sectors where Smoltek's patented nanotechnology platform can form the basis of new and improved material technology solutions. The first identified areas where Smoltek sees potential are energy storage systems, electrolyzers for hydrogen-based systems and bioelectrodes. Smoltek's carbon nanofiber-based technology platform could for example form the basis for new membrane-based applications in energy storage and energy conversion, with enhanced performance compared to current technology. In the area of electrolyzers, the company's technology has the potential to contribute to more area efficient electrodes, which would provide more efficient production in hydrogen production plants, as it would become possible to produce hydrogen at a lower cost or reducing the size of the plant.

For additional information, please contact:Marie Landfors, tf CEO of Smoltek Nanotech Holding AB (publ) E-mail: marie@smoltek.comPhone: +46 760-52 00 53Website: http://www.smoltek.com

Smoltek is a global company that develops process technology and concepts for applications based on carbon nanotechnology to solve advanced materials engineering problems in several industrial sectors. The company protects its unique technology through an extensive and expanding patent portfolio consisting of around 100 applied for patents, of which today 68 have been granted. Smoltek's share is listed on the Spotlight Stock Market in Stockholm, Sweden under the short name SMOL.

https://news.cision.com/smoltek-nanotech-holding-ab/r/ellinor-ehrnberg-appointed-as-new-president-of-the-group-company-smoltek-innovation-ab,c3403728

https://mb.cision.com/Main/16786/3403728/1459425.pdf

https://news.cision.com/smoltek-nanotech-holding-ab/i/ellinor-ehrnberg-2000x1125,c2947854

(c) 2021 Cision. All rights reserved., source Press Releases - English

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Smoltek Nanotech : Ellinor Ehrnberg appointed as new President of the group company Smoltek Innovation AB - marketscreener.com

What does all this mean for material science? A whole lot if you ask me. I mean, this is literally going to change to way we produced shielding of any kind, especially for law enforcement agencies. Hang on a second, I'm getting a little ahead of myself here.

A new study by engineers at the above-mentioned institutesdiscovered that nano-architected materials are showing insane promise in use as armor. What are nano-architected materials? Simply put, theyre materials and structures that are designed from precisely patterned nanoscale structures, meaning that the entire thing is a pre-meditated and arranged structure; what you see is exactly what was desired.

Not only this, but the material is completed from nanoscale carbon struts. Arranged much like rings in chainmail, these carbon struts are combined, layer upon layer to create the structure you see in the main photo. So yeah, medieval knights had it right all along, they just needed more layers of something that already weighed upwards of 40 lbs for a full body suit.

To do this, researchers shot laser-induced microparticles up to 1,100 meters per second at the nanostructure. A quick calculation and youre looking at a particle thats traveling at 3,608 feet per second. Want to know more? That's 2,460 miles per hour!

Two test structures were arranged, one with slightly looser struts, and the second with a tighter formation. The tighter formation kept the particle from tearing through and even embedded into the structure.

If thats not enough, and this is a big one, once the particle was removed and the underlying structure examined, researchers found that the surrounding structure remained intact. Yes, this means it can be reused.

To get an idea of where this sort of tech will be taking things, co-author of the paper, Julia R. Greer of Caltech, whose lab led the materials fabrication, says that The knowledge from this work could provide design principles for ultra-lightweight impact resistant materials [for use in] efficient armor materials, protective coatings, and blast-resistant shields desirable in defense and space applications.

Imagine for a second what this means once these structures are created on a larger scale. It will change the face of armor, be it destined for human or machine use, coatings, and downright clothing. Im not saying that suddenly we can stop bullets walking down the street, but it wont be long until funding for large-scale production begins, and what I just said may become a reality. Maybe not for all people at first, but the military will definitely have their eye on this tech.

More:

MIT and Caltech Create Crazy Carbon-Based Nanotech Alternative to Kevlar - autoevolution

Schumer also stopped without much fanfare at Albany Nanotech to meet with officials from IBM, NY-CREATES, which operates Albany Nanotech, along with officials from Applied Materials, a manufacturer of equipment used in chip fabs, and the New York State Economic Development Council.

Within the $52 billion USICA funding is $10.5 billion to separately underwrite computer chip research, including the establishment of what will be known as the National Semiconductor Technology Center (NSTC), which IBM and Albany Nanotech are trying to start in Albany, with possible locations in other parts of upstate.

Given the major research and development facility already in place on the (Albany Nanotech campus) and IBMs prominence in semiconductor research and development including their recent development of the worlds first chip with 2 nanometer technology at their (Albany Nanotech)facility Albany is the ideal location for the new NSTC.

Funding for the NSTC would be in the billions and would likely require the construction of new facilities at Albany Nanotech to support those efforts.

Just as he did at Fab 8 a week ago, Schumer brought U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo to Albany Nanotech to meet top executives there. Raimondo is a former governor from Rhode Island who worked in venture capital and business in the past and knows the high tech sector well.

The NSTC would mean $2 billion in federal funding as well as 1,000 jobs for the Capital Region's high-tech sector. That level of economic development impact would be on a par with that of a second fab Fab 8.2 at Malta, which GlobalFoundries plans to build if the USICA passes the House and is signed into law by President Joe Biden.

"IBM commends Sen. Schumer and Secretary Raimondo for their focus on reinvigorating Americas competitive edge in semiconductor innovation and manufacturing, Dario Gil, director of IBM Research said. "As a proud member of this ecosystem, IBM is prepared to take a leadership role to make the NSTC a success.

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Schumer met behind scenes with IBM on national chip lab - Times Union

Contrary to entrenched popular lore, earthshaking inventions hardly ever spring fully formed from the overheated brain of a single supergenius. They blow in with the intellectual zeitgeist, products of an era when many researchers know something big is about to happen and pursue it with the intensity of sharks feasting on a fresh seal carcass.

Thus, for every Alexander Graham Bell, there was an Elisha Gray; for every Thomas Edison, a Joseph Swan. And someday, if nanotechnology makes good on its promise to revolutionize human society, Gerd Binnig will have his Tom Rust. Or, perhaps, Tom Rust will have his Gerd Binnig.

Binnig, a Nobel laureate in physics and a star in IBM Corp.s metamorphosing research apparatus, and Rust, a self-taught engineer who founded a start-up with a staff of 16, are in many ways nanotechnologys least likely pair of combatants. Theyre a couple of mavericks who, after 20 years of hunches, feverish experimentation, and perpetually mutating designs, are now on the brink of what could be nanotechnologys first truly big commercial breakthrough: a memory system that could up the ante in the high-stakes struggle to keep data storage on a par with the pitiless pace of advances in consumer and computing electronics.

With longstanding promises of infinitesimal machines that manipulate matter literally atom by atom, advances in nanotechnology and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) have been the stuff of countless research theses, business plans (mostly failed ones), and science fiction plots. After all, when the atom is your building block, materials of astounding properties, vastly faster and smaller electronics, and even synthetic human tissues are all within the realm of possibility.

So far, though, nanotech and MEMS have delivered much more breathless hype than broadly transformative technology. And thats why the emerging nano- and MEMS-based data-storage application, which is called probe storage, has corporate researchers in a feeding frenzy. Packing Brobdingnagian memories in Lilliputian packages, probe drives are prime candidates to combine the low cost, high capacity, and random-access features of ordinary magnetic hard-disk drives with the low power draw, high data rate, small size, and nonvolatility of solid-state flash memories. In so doing, they could fuel burgeoning markets for super-high-capacity personal media players and pocketable computers with storage far exceeding that of todays desktop models.

Demonstrations in the last few years by companies like IBM and Rusts company, Nanochip Inc., in Fremont, Calif., show that probe drives can cram a terabit (128 gigabytes) into each square inch of memory media. (The industrys standard measure for the density of bits that can be packed onto storage media is expressed in the English unit of inches.) For contrast, conventional magnetic hard drives, such as the one-inch microdrives found in products like the Apple iPod, can at best achieve only 250 to 300 gigabits per square inch. They are subject to the superparamagnetic limit, the density above which magnetic domains are so small that thermal fluctuations interfere with the mediums ability to hold steady magnetization and, therefore, data. The huge capacity of probe systems translates into as many as 125 hours of DVD-quality video recording time, which would allow digital video camera makers to dump those bulky, power-sucking tape drives and shrink camcorders to fit in shirt pockets. Media players that now rely on DVD drives could store 25 movies on a chip and lose the drive altogether.

Developers of probe drives expect that the first generation of deviceswhich could be on the market as soon as January 2007will compete directly with flash memory, now a staple in digital cameras, cellphones, USB key-chain memories, and MP3 players. Flash was a US $4.8 billion market in 2004, according to Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn.and its growing, to $8.4 billion by 2008, Gartner predicts.

With a potential market worth billions, IBM and Nanochip have plenty of competition in probe drives. Seagate and Samsung are pouring millions into probe-storage R&D; Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, and Philips have all explored probe drives over the last few years.

Nevertheless, IBM and Nanochip are unquestionably in the front rank, having worked on the technology longer than any other companies and having logged major prototype milestones in the last year. In recent years IBM has been focusing more and more of its R&D on software that helps corporate computer systems monitor and administer themselves automatically and on services to optimize business processes for corporate clients. Its probe-storage project, called Millipede, is something of a throwback to the days when hardware ruled in Big Blues labs. Since IBM no longer has the facilities to manufacture Millipede devices, the company is considering looking for a partner to commercialize it, according to Karin Vey, communications manager at IBMs Zurich Research Laboratory (ZRL), where the Millipede project is based. Vey emphasizes that IBM has not yet made a final decision about Millipedes commercial future and that it is conceivable that the Millipede technology will not be sold as a product by itself but will find its way into other products. But to knowledgeable outsiders, Millipede seems to be a technology looking for a home, or at least a licensee.

For the privately held Nanochip, meanwhile, the challenge is that of any start-up: getting technology to market before funding runs out. So it isnt much of a stretch to say that the near-term future of one of the most promising memory technologies in decades is in the hands of a colossal multinational that isnt sure what it wants to do with it and a tiny start-up that is burning its venture capital with each passing day.

Supposedly stupendous memory technologies have come and gone before without ever ruffling the commercial market. Holographic memory as a mass-market technology has been just around the corner for at least 25 years. More recently, schemes based on molecules or even bacterial proteins have excited researchers before turning out to have essentially insurmountable manufacturing, longevity, or other problems.

What makes probe memory different is that it is based on proven technologies. Probe memory is an offshoot of the scanning probe microscope, a form of which was invented in 1981 by Binnig (hence his Nobel prize) and Heinrich Rohrer, a Swiss physicist who retired in 1997 after 34 years at ZRL. These nonoptical microscopes, which include the scanning tunneling and atomic force microscopes, scan the surface being examined with the tip of a long, thin wisp of metal or silicon called a cantilever. The cantilevers probe tip is just atoms wide, so it maps surfaces with atomic-scale resolution.

The Pioneers of Probe:Nanochip founder and CTO Tom Rust (left) and CEO Gordon Knight are vying for the nanotech-storage prize. Nobel laureate Gerd Binnig (far right), inventor of the scanning probe and atomic force microscopes, is the driving force behind IBMs Millipede project.Photos: Pat Mazzera; Christian Dietrich

Basically, a probe memory uses arrays of dozens or hundreds of these same tips to write, read, and erase nanoscale bits in neat columns on a piece of storage medium made of specially engineered plastic or an exotic alloy. Depending on the probe-drive design, either the storage medium or the probe-tip array is mounted on a moving platform, which scans the stationary component to align the tips with either bits to be read or locations where bits are to be written. To write, read, or erase data, the tips are heated and then pressed onto the medium. Because the tips are so fine, the bits occupy spaces on the medium just 10 nanometers wide, or roughly the width of 100 hydrogen atoms.

Like a hard disk drive or an optical disc drive, a probe-drive system accesses data at random locations by reading current through the tips as they pass over the bits to determine whether they are 1s or 0s. Control circuitry aligns the mechanical components with nanometer precision, and error-correction codes ensure the integrity of the data being written and read. The basic concept has been proved over and over by both IBM and Nanochip. The game now is making the memory devices cheaply by the millions and fabricating probe tips that, despite their extreme delicacy, can withstand the wear of tens of thousands of read/write cycles.

The story of probe storage begins with Binnigs co-invention of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) 24 years ago. It let researchers see, for the first time, surface features down to the atomic scale. With a voltage applied to it, an STMs ultrasharp tip, which is very close to but not touching a sample of conductive material, attracts electrons from the materials surface atoms, resulting in a weak current. Since the amount of current depends on the distance between the tip and the surface, measuring the current as the tip scans the sample provides the data necessary to plot a three-dimensional picture of the samples surface.

It was Nobel-quality work, but Binnig was already looking for something better: he wanted to image insulators as well as conductors. He was drowsing on his couch while on sabbatical in 1985 when he literally dreamed up the idea of the atomic force microscope, or AFM, which would eventually become the basis for probe-storage technology. In the process of creating these two nonoptical instruments to image materials on the atomic scale, he had stumbled on a means to manipulate, as well as characterize, matter at the nanoscale. In effect, he had opened a window on what the physicist Richard P. Feynman famously termed the bottom, in his 1959 talk at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society about the problem of manipulating and controlling things on a small scale.

Throughout the 1980s, atomic manipulation with STM probes fascinated researchers. Several labs, including ones at AT&T, Stanford University, Hitachi, and the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, used STM probes to build crude features on surfaces atom by atom. But it wasnt until 1990, when Nature published the now famous picture of the letters I-B-M spelled out in 35 xenon atoms, that it really hit home with people outside the insular STM research community: you could use probes to move individual atoms around in a highly controlled manner [see photo, SmallBlue].

Smalll Blue:Donald M. Eigler and Erhard Schweizer at IBM's Almaden Research Center spent 22 hours writing the IBM logo with a scanning tunneling microscope, pushing around 35 xenon atoms on a nickel surface.Image: IBM

Among the people most impressed by IBM writ small was Nanochip founder and chief technology officer Tom Rust. If you could use probe tips to create orderly patterns on surfaces, he reasoned, it followed that you could use those same STM probes to write and read data. I saw what IBM had done with a scanning tunneling microscope and spelling out I-B-M,he says, and that inspired me to use probes to build a disk drive.

It was 1991, and Rust, an engineer who had spent most of his career working on hardware and software for displays, had just devoured K. Eric Drexlers nanotech manifesto Engines of Creation (Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1986). He was looking for a way to engineer Drexlers ideas into products when IBM, his future rival, provided the answer. Though he had no experience with nanotechnology, he plunged into it with the fervor of a true believer.

Rusts divergent career had begun in 1975, when, as an undergraduate computer science major at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he took on a consulting gig for Magnavox Co. to build one of the first graphic cathode-ray-tube displays. He soon dropped out of college to create arcade video games and eventually went on to run a series of small businesses that produced 3-D solid modeling and animation hardware and software. This phase of his career culminated in a commission from the government of Singapore in 1990 to build a $2 million laser-dappled musical water fountain that now gushes on Sentosa Island, off Singapores coast.

Then, infected by Drexlers visions of nanomechanical assemblers that could fabricate any kind of material or machine from the atoms up, he caught the nanotechnology bug and holed up for several weeks in the library stacks at the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University doing what he had done his whole lifeteaching himself something new. He quickly concluded that he would have to use some sort of MEMS-based device as a platform for his STM probe, so he delved into technical journals to learn MEMS design and manufacturing.

After hearing that Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California, had an STM, Rust contacted the lab and learned of a U.S. Department of Energy program that provided $5000 grants to small businesses so they could access lab facilities and services. Rust applied, and soon he found himself at Livermore developing a write-once medium on which an STM could make 30-nm diameter donuts, his first nanobits. For that he and Joanne Culver, his research partner and wife, were awarded U.S. Patent No. 5453970, but further investigation and extensive reading quickly led him to shift from his original STM concept to another technology invented by Binnig at IBM, the atomic force microscope.

Both map the topography of the surface of a material using a sharp-tipped cantilever, but in contrast to the STM, the AFM maps the surface of a material with laser light. As the probe scans the sample surface, the electron clouds orbiting the atoms at the tip bump the ones orbiting the atoms on the samples surface, ever so slightly deflecting the cantilever. A photodetector records the laser light reflected off the cantilever, providing the data necessary to determine the amount of deflection, and to create a 3-D image of the surface topology.

While intrigued with the idea of using an AFM tip in direct contact with a surface to read and write bits, Rust knew that the speed of the tip skimming over a spinning disk would quickly grind the tip down. So he designed a MEMS device that would hold the tip and help it nimbly skip over the rotating platter, touching down only where it needed to write a bit, until it ran out of travel. Then the MEMS platform would hop backward over the medium, not unlike the automated stylus arm on a turntable, which at the end of a record picks up and moves back to the starting position.

One day I was looking at the complexity of this and thought, well, this is crazy! says Rust with a chuckle. Instead of skip-hopping heads over a spinning disk, he figured he could have the MEMS platform move up and down and side to side over a stationary storage material, radically cutting down on component complexity and power consumption. The Nanochip was born.

Rust built the first MEMS devices in 1994 with a 0.8-micrometer process traditionally used for making chips. He designed and built four platforms per die, with eight cantilevers on each, along with some electronic controls. It was, he admits, a dismal failure that taught him a lot about MEMS and chip design and fabrication, including the fact that the Nanochip (or IBMs Millipede for that matter) doesnt need to be made by the worlds most advanced 90-nm chip fabrication process. An old 1-mm fab is perfectly capable of making MEMS scanners and AFM tip arrays, a major reason that researchers are confident theyll be able to fabricate probe drives cheaply.

For the next two years, Rust shuttled across San Francisco Bay between his house in Oakland and the Stanford campus, where he paid to use MEMS fabrication equipment to prototype his designs and tweak the fabrication process. By 1996, he had made enough progress to impress his deep-pocketed friend Jerry Fiddler, founder of Wind River Systems Inc., a software company in Alameda, Calif. With Fiddlers backing, Rust phased out his computer graphics business and incorporated his new endeavor as Nanochip.

The notion of using the AFM not only to characterize a surface but also to manipulate materials at the atomic scalethe foundation of probe storagewas a serendipitous byproduct of the AFMs development, Binnig says. We always made mistakes and then you produced a little indentation in the samples. So the manipulation was always a side effect, and in the early days it was clear this would also be important.

In the early 1990s, a researcher at IBMs Almaden Research Center, Dan Rugar, used an AFM probe to write and read bits. Like Rust, Rugar initially used a spinning disk. In Rugars setup, a laser heated the probe tip, which in turn pressed into a rotating polycarbonate disk, softening it and creating a shallow pit representing a bit, in this case a 1. Rugars prototype stored 30 Gb/in2, but there was no way to erase and rewrite data.

And there was no readily apparent way around the potential showstopper, the slow data rate of a single mechanical AFM probe tip, which takes about a microsecond to write or read a bit, something flash memories and hard disk drives do in a nanosecond.

Rust used a few probes operating in parallel to increase the data rate. Binnig thought bigger. Why not have thousands of cantilevers working in parallel? he recalls asking colleagues around 1994. If you have a thousand probes, youre a thousand times faster on a chip that is three by three millimeters, and youre competitive with flash and its 2- to 10-megabytes-per-second data rate.

Market competitiveness wasnt on the agenda when Binnig and his colleague Peter Vettiger first kicked around ideas like this when they played for the ZRL soccer team in the late 1970s. After games they would often grab a beer in a nearby pub. Their conversations inevitably came around to the same idea: the fabrication and operation of large-scale micro- and nanomechanical devices on a single chip.

Those ideas sat in cold storage during the 1980s, while Binnig invented the AFM, spent time in the United States, and eventually started up the IBM physics group at the University of Munich, in Germany. It wasnt until Binnig returned to Zurich in 1994 that he and Vettiger got serious about turning their nano musings into a real device. Soon after Binnigs arrival, fellow footballer and Nobel laureate Rohrer organized the first of many brainstorming sessions that focused on creating large AFM probe arrays on a single silicon chip for highly parallel and ultradense data storage.

IBM had just sold off its laser unit, for which Vettiger, an IEEE Fellow, had been in charge of technology research. Keenly aware that IBM was in the throes of a major change, he and Binnig understood that they needed to focus on research projects with a near-future payoff. They decided to pool their talents and the resources of the science and technology and the systems departments at ZRL. They officially established the Millipede project in 1996, the same year that Rust incorporated Nanochip. The race was on.

In the 1990s, IBM, which pioneered the modern hard disk drive with the 3340 Winchester in 1973, was a major player in data-storage hardware. But for the 21st-century company, Millipede is a throwback. With the acquisition of PricewaterhouseCoopers and the sale of its hard drive business to Hitachi, both in 2002, Big Blue is focusing on software and services. Nowadays, it routinely pairs researchers with consultants to reengineer the guts of a corporate computer system or to make a supply chain more efficient. The Millipede work, however, brings glimpses of the old IBM research system, where researchers published profusely and left hardly any ramification of an invention unexplored.

In stark contrast, Nanochip has maintained a much lower profile, quietly pumping out only enough patent applications and prototypes to entice investors, technology partners, and potential customers. The Nanochip architecture is designed in-house. Everything else is contracted out: the fabrication, the storage media, the control and interface electronics, the error-correction codes, and the packaging. This strategy, company executives insist, will allow Nanochip to quickly mix and match components to meet the needs of a smart-phone maker one day and a digital-camcorder company the next.

Such a low-overhead business model is the difference between a fabless, VC-funded start-up that must produce a fast return on investment and a research program that will go on regardless of the products ultimate commercial fate, according to Evangelos Eleftheriou, the Millipede project comanager. Eleftheriou, an IEEE Fellow, says that in theory finely controlled cantilever arrays can manipulate anything on the molecular and atomic scales, from engineering individual proteins to writing lines on a chip that are an order of magnitude thinner than todays best optical lithography can produce.

By 1998, the millipede team had fashioned an array of 25 silicon cantilevers with aluminum heaters near the tips. The device could read bits but not write them. The team wanted to write a 1 by heating a cantilever tip and pressing it into the polymer medium to form a shallow pit. A zero would be easyjust leave the bit location untouched.

The inability of the 25-cantilever array to write 1s was caused by the passage through the cantilevers of high current, which forced the aluminum ions in the heaters to clump together, creating voids that inhibited the conduction needed to warm the tips. The answer here, the researchers found, was to make the heaters out of silicon too.

Another problem cropped up around the same time: the current needed to heat each probe tip could not be confined to a single cantilever. When current was sent to a cantilever, some leaked out. Eventually that leaked current accumulated and flowed all over the array, wreaking havoc with signals or causing short circuits. The uncontrolled flow of current would only get worse with more tips packed closer together, and the next milestone, a demonstration of a 1024-tip array, was coming up.

In solid-state memories, the flow of current is controlled by transistor switches, but the temperatures used to create the probe tips would destroy any transistors the Millipede team might try to integrate onto the cantilever.

Vettiger and colleague Michel Despont proposed that each Millipede cantilever have a Schottky diode, rather than a transistor, to restrict the current flow. Unlike a transistor, the diode could withstand the thermal processing necessary to create the adjacent tip. The metal-semiconductor-junction Schottky diode allows the current intended for its assigned cantilever to flow through it with almost no loss (Schottky diodes have especially low forward-voltage drop). The diode also blocks the flow of current in the reverse direction, sealing the cantilever off and keeping stray current from running amok on the device. In effect, the diodes allow cantilevers to be addressed individually for read, write, and erase functions.

After integrating the Schottky diodes, the team discovered that a curious thermal phenomenon gave them an unanticipated bonus. The tips scan over the medium to detect bits, interpreting pits as 1s and flat locations as zeroes. When a tip dips into a pit, the temperature, and therefore the cantilevers electrical resistance, drops, reliably and very sensitively indicating a 1. When the tip scans a flat location, the temperature, and therefore the resistance, is unchanged, indicating a zero. The team had been using piezoresistive sensors at the base of each cantilever to convert the mechanical strain of a tip dipping into a pit into a change in resistance that could be read as a bit. With their new thermomechanical sensing mechanism in hand, the IBM researchers could dispense with the piezoresistive sensors.

In May 1998, equipped with the new silicon heaters and the integrated Schottky diodes, the team demonstrated an array of 1024 cantilevers that could read and write on a polymer surface. IBM, with Millipede, was out in front of the probe drive pack, followed by a team at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, and Hewlett-Packard Co., in Palo Alto, Calif., which eventually abandoned its program.

Meanwhile, back in California, Silicon Valley was erupting with the irrational exuberance of the dot-com bonanza. Although Rust now had three employees, he was doing most of the design, layout, mechanical work, and simulations of the Nanochip himself. He had just completed the first prototype that successfully integrated cantilevers, tips, and a moving platform, and was about to test it with the charge-based storage medium he was using at the time, when personal tragedy struck.

In August 1999, Rusts wife, Joanne, who at the time was helping Rust manage Nanochip Inc., died of breast cancer. Some people might have found solace in religion or alcohol. Rust glommed onto the Nanochip.

After my wife died, I realized that I could make a contribution by developing something that could hopefully benefit everybody in some large-scale way, he says. Money was never an objective for me. I was doing this with a larger scheme of things in mind.

Going back to work a few months after his wife passed away, Rust was determined to commercialize the technology. So he hired a new management team to guide the business through its next phase. Then, just as Rust was getting back into a working groove, corporate skullduggery almost torpedoed Nanochip altogether.

The company had linked up with an investor that gave the company enough working capital for it to continue development on a limited scale and to engage an outside contractor to make a controller for the Nanochip (an effort that ultimately failed).

Around the same time, for reasons Nanochips current executives are legally barred from discussing, the companys cash suddenly evaporated, leaving Rust alone and deep in the red.

Despite the bleak circumstances, Rust clung to the notion that the Nanochip had a commercial future and decided to put together yet another management team. Id watched over the years the enormous growth in the uses of atomic probes for so many different analytical applications, says Rust. That in itself kept me believing that the technology would get there.

Within a few months of Nanochips near collapse, Rust met Gordon Knight, who, like many Silicon Valley executives in 2002, was looking for a job after the dot-com implosion. Knight, founder of three optical disc storage companies and former CEO at Maxoptix Corp., in Louisville, Colo., was willing to work for Nanochip without pay until he could find some funding. He quickly orchestrated a deal with a Malaysian concern, AKN Technology Bhd, in Penang, which came through with $1.8 million, enough for Rust and Nanochip to pay off some debts and produce a prototype.

By the time the company showed the prototype to potential second-round investors last year, it had gone through as many changes as Rust had.

Even as his company was fighting for survival in 2000, Rust was in the lab, reengineering the Nanochip. In contrast to Millipede, where the storage medium sits on a MEMS platform that moves in relation to a stationary array of probe tips, the Nanochips probe-tip arrays are on platforms that move in the x and y directions in relation to a stationary storage medium. Whereas Millipedes probe tips use electrostatic forces to move up and down on the z-axis, bringing them into contact with the medium, as late as 2000, Rust was controlling each cantilever with an actuator that vibrated each tip up and down the z-axis, to put the tips in contact with the medium. A piezoresistive sensor attached to each cantilever sensed the tips position on the z-axis, information that was fed to the external controller to tell it where the tip was in the read/write process.

Like Rusts original rotating-disk storage device, the mechanism was too complex to be made commercially. He decided to get rid of the sensors and vibrating actuator. Instead he chose passive cantilevers that are spring-loaded against the storage medium at all times, with an electrical connection to facilitate heating and bit sensing.

Then Rust spotted another opportunity for simplification. At the time, the charge-based media he was using required a capacitance sensor and some accompanying electronics. By switching to media that had a much larger signal output, Rust could dump those components, slashing 30 to 40 percent from the manufacturing cost.

Its the kind of challenge that IBM would handle by throwing together a team of the worlds foremost materials scientists and industrial physicists and giving them orders to invent a new miracle material. But Rust had to find something off the shelf, which he did at Ovonyx Inc., in Sunnyvale, Calif. The company sells a storage material made of germanium-antimony-tellurium (GeSbTe), or GST, a member of a class of substances called chalcogenides. Its used in rewritable CDs and DVDs and is even the basis of yet another flash competitor, the Ovonic Unified Memory, which Ovonyx is developing with Intel, STMicroelectronics, and BAE Systems.

The Nanochip:In this prototype Nanochip device made in 2004, probe-tip arrays are arranged on 16moving platforms (right). The probe tip (close-up, top) reads and writes data. This prototype chip is capable of storing data at a density of 1terabit per square inch. The micrograph close-up (center) shows one of the 16platforms with the silicon cantilevers bending upward; they are spring-loaded against the storage medium (not shown) and are moved horizontally by actuators surrounding the edge of each moveableplatform.Images: Nanochip

When heated by an AFM probe tip, the GST material quickly switches between stable amorphous and crystalline phases. The two states have very different electrical resistances: amorphous is high, crystalline is low. To write data, the tip heats the chalcogenide past its melting point; when the substance is quenchedthink hot steel plunged into cold waterthe heated region is in an amorphous state. To make it crystalline again, the tip heats the region to just below the melting point for a few nanoseconds to allow the atoms to form crystalline structures. To read data, the probe detects whether the resistance is higha 1 at a crystalline bit spaceor lowa zero at an amorphous one.

We discovered that we could produce incredibly tiny bits, much smaller than what we had ever thought we could do, says Rust, of those heady days in early 2003. We had been planning on 25- to 40-nm-diameter bits, and we were right off the bat doing bits that were as small as 10 or 15nmacross.

On 21 May 2003, Rust and company tested the new prototype. After writing some bits on the GST media, they switched into read mode and had the device scan for data. The data wasnt always there, Rust recalls. But on several of the scans the data was clearly there, at the correct timing position.

After seven more months of tweaking and testing, in February 2004, the GST-based Nanochip prototype impressed investors to the tune of more than $20 million in second-round funding from JK&B Capital, Microsoft, New Enterprise Associates, and Nanochips old benefactor, AKN [see photo, The Nanochip].

While nanochip was landing millions in funding, Gerd Binnig was putting on a little show in his office at ZRL. With a gleam in his eye, he produced a sponge and a golf ball and explained that a big challenge for Millipede is that the repeated heating and scraping of the tips against the media could wear out both at an unacceptable rate. Binnig had been working on the problem in his kitchen late one recent evening. He had been contemplating a ruined roasting pan, a casualty of his quest for a simple way to model the storage media half of that interaction. Undaunted by his past failures or the prospect of spousal wrath, he took another pan, shaved some candles down to their wicks, and put the collected wax in the oven to melt. Then Binnig dunked a sponge in the hot liquid and let it cool and harden. Binnig pressed a golf ball into the wax-soaked sponge, put a weight on top of it, and waited. The ultimate rewritable medium had just recorded its first bit.

I took the ball out when it was cooled down, and there was this nice indentation, he recalls. And when I raised the ball off the sponge and heated the sponge up again, the indentation popped up. The springiness of the sponge takes care that it always comes up, and the viscosity of the wax lets you switch back and forth from liquid to solid, depending on temperature.

Thus, in IBMs current probe-storage system, the AFM tips act as nano-golf balls. They record, read, and erase bits on a mediumwhich corresponds to the waxy sponge. In the IBM system, the medium is actually a heavily cross-linked polymer, in which long stringy molecules are linked together by chemical chains to form a single giant molecule.

To write a 1, the cantilevers designated to write a bit are heated to 400 C using resistive heaters integrated next to the tips. Simultaneously, a voltage is applied to a capacitive platform that sits between the two prongs of each wishbone-shaped cantilever, creating an electrostatic force that bends the cantilevers up and brings the tips into contact with the polymer. The hot tips press into the polymer and soften it, forming pits that measure a few nanometers in depth and 10 to 15 nm in diameter and are linearly spaced at 20-nm intervals.

To read data, a second resistive heater next to each tip is heated to about 200 C. When a tip moves into a pit, the cantilever and heater come closer to the polymer substrate, which cools the heater more efficiently. As a result, the heaters resistance changes, and this change is detected by readout electronics. Because cooling is more efficient when the tip is in a pit, a 1 is detected as a decrease in resistance resulting from a decrease in temperature. But since the temperature differences, and therefore the resistance changes, are infinitesimal, data are processed by advanced error-correction codes before they are written and after they are read.

TheMillipede:In this small-scale prototype of the Millipede device (above), the scanner array has thirty-two 600-nanometer-long silicon cantilevers (above, right), honed to just a few atoms at the tip (right). The cantilevers sit on a stationary platform facing up toward the 6.4- by 6.4-millimeter recording medium (not shown)a 100-nm-thick cross-linked polymer bound to a silicon substrate and suspended by silicon springs 500 nm above the probes like a miniature trampoline. The polymer is moved in thexandydirections relative to the probes by built-in electromagnets, while electrostatic forces bend individual cantilevers upward to contact the polymer. To write a 1, the cantilevers designated to write a bit are heated to 400 C by resistive heaters integrated next to the tips. Simultaneously, a voltage is applied to the capacitive platform at the center of each cantilever, bending it up and into contact with the polymer. The hot cantilever tips press into the polymer and soften it, forming pits a few nanometers deep and about 15 nm in diameter. The pits are spaced at 20-nm intervals. To read a 1, a second resistive heater next to the tip is heated to only about 200 C. When a tip finds a pit (a 1) at its read location, the tip moves into the pit, and the cantilever and heater come closer to the polymer substrate, which cools the heater. As a result, the heater's resistance changes, and this change is detected by readout electronics as a 1. For a zero, this resistance does not change. In the November 2004 demonstration, this text was converted into binary data of 1s and zeroes and sent to the Millipede prototype. The prototype successfully stored the text in the form of pits and flat bit spaces to indicate 1s and zeroes, respectively, at a density of 517 gigabits per square inch.Photos: IBM; Illustration: Bryan Christie

There are two ways to erase data. One involves placing a 400 C tip in a pit and heating it until the polymer springs up, as Binnigs model showed; the other requires a hot tip to press into the polymer near a pit, forming a new bit and in the process filling in, and erasing, the neighboring pit.

The storage media, along with the rest of the Millipede device, passed its first comprehensive test in a small-scale prototype demonstration held this past November. The critical componentsthe probe array, microscanner for moving the storage medium, servomechanism, analog electronics, detection circuitry, digital signal processor, and error-correction codesall worked together to achieve an important milestone: the successful storage and retrieval of a text message at an areal density of 517 Gb/in2. Not only did the assembly work as promised, but the whole control process worked, too [see photo and diagrams, The Millipede].

Though clearly pleased with the success of the Millipede demonstration, held in front of IBM brass, project managers Johannes Windeln and Eleftheriou arent satisfied. This isnt over. This is a small demonstrator, and there are many issues that we have to work on, Eleftheriou said afterward in a phone interview. Chief among them is improving the control of the MEMS microscanner to subnanometer precision, so that it can clearly and reliably write at areal densities as high as 1 Tb/in2. To compete with flash, the team also has to make tradeoffs among parameters such as the number of tips in a system, power consumption, and read- and write-data rates.

So whats next? This is a research group, not a development laboratory, Eleftheriou replies when asked about Millipedes next milestone. It is our job in research to understand a new technology and bring it to a point where a development group can make a product out of it.

Manufacturability will determine whether or not consumers will ever slot Millipede or Nanochip memories into their media players or camcorders. According to Marlene Bourne, a MEMS analyst at In-Stat, Scottsdale, Ariz., manufacturability hinges on component complexity. While the Nanochip is very similar to the Millipede, it doesnt have as complex an array of tips, she says. I think theyre quite a ways down in terms of complexity.

Bourne knows the basic concept behind the Nanochip but not much more, which is just the way Nanochip likes it.

Our investors are pretty edgy about us talking, says Nanochip CEO Knight. Theres no point in advance publicity, and then if youre late, everybody starts throwing stones at you. Though he cautions that the company still has a lot to do before it samples beta units, Knight says hes confident the Nanochip will be on the market within two years.

Bourne is more skeptical about the near-term prospects for probe storage, but she is convinced it will ultimately emerge, perhaps five or six years from now, as a strong competitor to flash. Unfortunately, the time to market for most MEMS devices is a lot longer than people would like, she says. I have no doubt that at some point there will be a MEMS rival to flash memory on the marketif not these two specific architectures, then something very similar. Its just a question of when.

It is also still a question of who. Seagate Technology LLC, in Scotts Valley, Calif., has an active probe-storage program based on technology developed at Carnegie Mellon. But theres also Samsung Group, in Seoul, South Korea, the worlds top manufacturer of DRAM chips, which has been presenting papers recently on its probe-storage research. And Samsung holds the most recently granted U.S. patent for a probe drive, No. 6762402, issued on 13 July 2004, which if nothing else indicates that the race to the bottom is still wide open.

Gerd Binnig and his colleagues described the Millipede system in great technical detail in The MillipedeNanotechnology Entering Data Storage, by P. Vettiger et al., IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology, March 2002.

You can follow Tom Rust and Nanochips progress at http://www.nanochip.com.

Original post:

The Race to the Bottom - IEEE Spectrum

Haifa-based nanotech startup Feelit has completed its first significant funding round, announcing on Monday that it has raised a $7 million Series A, four years after its founding. German automotive parts giant Continental and Henkel Tech Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of Henkel Adhesive Technologies, each invested $3 million, with the Vasuko Global Tech Fund investing $1 million.

This funding round is a significant step in our global strategic efforts, said Konvalina. "We're excited to have Tier 1 international partners on board who provide us not only with capital, but in addition, contribute their extensive strategic knowledge, experience and market reach.

Feelit

Data access and quality are key challenges in any predictive maintenance setup, especially when dealing with legacy infrastructure," noted Nils Berkemeyer, Partner at Continentals venture capital unit. "Feelits state of the art sensing technology seamlessly integrates with any existing manufacturing setup and delivers superior data quality via proprietary non-invasive sensors. We are excited to be an early backer of such a transformative company and see various key applications at Continental, which can thrive in combination with Feelit."

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Nanotech startup Feelit raises $7 million led by Continental and Henkel | Ctech - CTech