Of Nanotech Dreams and Revenue Streams

James von Ehr, founder and CEO of Zyvex, is a high concept kind of guy. Zyvex was created for the express purpose of making atomically precise manufacturing a reality. He expects Zyvex to be the next GE. So it was a little surprising when a press release came out last week revealing that he had made an equity investment in Atomate.

Atomate is a tools company. Specifically, they make carbon vapor deposition systems for the production of carbon nanotubes and other nanomaterials. Plus, they work on process development. It could be a good business, especially with everybody and his mother trying to get into nanotech. But it doesn’t sound like a von Ehr sort of business. Selling nanotools may get you up to a $100 million company, says Jim, but there’s not enough volume or high enough margins to grow a major corporation in this area. So, when I got the chance to interview Jim, I asked him about Atomate.

Nanotechnology.com had sent me off to the NanoCommerce conference with a handy little MP3 recording device. The idea was to record interviews with prominent nanotech pioneers; these will be available soon as downloadable sound files on the website.In addition to Von Ehr, so far I’ve recorded conversations with David Macdonald, CEO of Nanomix, and Donald Tomalia, the initial inventor of dendrimers, and the founder of Dendritic Nanotechnologies.

So what was von Ehr’s interest in Atomate? In turns out that CEO Brian Lim had taken him aside and had given him a private presentation. Lim is working on the prototype of something that involves nanotubes and a market worth billions of dollars. Jim says the product addresses a decades old industry, but beyond that he wouldn’t give any clues.

Baseball bats, manipulators and MEMS

So what’s the real killer app for carbon nanotubes right now? Baseball bats, of course. Zyvex makes a product called Nanosolve, which is a solution of carbon nanotubes that have been disaggregated, dispersed and modified so that they can be incorporated into polyurethane, epoxy resins or polymers. Easton Sports has used Nanosolve to incorporate nanotubes into its new Stealth CNT carbon fiber baseball bat. Optimized flex, responsiveness and more kick, says Easton about their new bat. It’s not legal in the major leagues, however, where they still use the original nanocomposite—wood. Easton is also putting nanotubes into bicycle parts.

Zyvex’ major product line is nanomanipulators, which allows you to play with your nanoparticles under an electron microscope. These are mostly sold to the semiconductor industry, which finds they are wonderful tools for probing their chips.

A new project for Zyvex is a “neurotransponder” that could eventually allow people with spinal cord injuries to get up and walk. The idea is to transpose neural impulses into a signal that could be broadcast to a receiver attached to a nerve on the other side of the spinal cord lesion. The signal would be decoded back into neural impulse, hopefully stimulating the right muscle to do the right thing at the right time. The transponder, we are told, is about the size of one of Jim von Ehr’s ear hairs.

Zyvex has a large grant to work on MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) with Honeywell. The idea is to make tools that will allow you to make smaller tools that will eventually allow you to work efficiently with one atom at a time. This idea is right out of Feynman’s “There’s plenty of room at the bottom” talk, the classical top down approach to nanotechnology.

Atomically precise manufacturing will not be performed with Drexler’s nanobots. Instead it will involve an assembly line-like process within a fairly large machine, according to Jim. The first material that Zyvex will work with is silicon. They hope to be able to program the production of atomically precise three dimensional structures in the not too distant future. The dream come true.