Flash Nano

In preparation for the NanoCommerce Forum/SEMI conference in Chicago, I’ve been talking out nanotech-enabled memory chips like Nantero’s carbon nanotube memory and NVE’s MRAM (see previous posts.

John Oliver, from Innov8 Consulting (Calgary, Alberta), and a fellow BCC industry analyst, sent me an e-mail reminding me that nanotech is also invading flash memory processes.

“As a follow up to yesterday’s carbon nanotube memory post,” says John, “are you aware of Freescale’s nanoscale flash memory technology? This is now in commercial product launch mode targeted for release sometime 2006. The first generation platform, which is adaptable to existent clean room fabrication technologies, is based on chemical vapor deposition (CVD) of silicon nanocrystals (around 5 nm in diameter) with 10E12/cm2 (equivalent to 20-30%) wafer coverage. Its nanomemory densities are claimed to be well beyond its competitors (e.g. Samsung, Toshiba) ‘top down’ conventional technologies. Coupled with this is the near-future potential of adopting solution-based colloidal quantum dots. These offer tighter particle size distributions (PSDs), and hence much higher self-ordering, hence density, of Freescale’s first generation CVD synthesized Si ncs.”

Well, no John, I wasn’t aware, but thanks for keeping me informed. Keep those cards and letters coming in folks. Freescale, incidentally, is the former semiconductor business of Motorola, now spun off as a stand alone business, with almost $6 billion in revenue. It has attributes lacking in most strictly nano tech companies, large size and revenues.

I’m in Chicago now, at McCormick Center, which is about a block from the lake and almost as big as the terminal at O’Hare. Nanotech is certainly playing bigger venues, these days.

Carbon Nanotube Memory

Nantero, a tiny entrepreneurial company, has the modest ambition of replacing all existing computer memory chips, not to mention those in cell-phones, digital cameras, and MP3 players, with its carbon nanotube based NRAM (nanotube-based nonvolatile random access memory) chips. Nantero was started by NRAM inventor Thomas Ruekes, Harvard chemist Brent Segal and CEO Greg Schmergel.

According to Schmergel, the advantages of NRAM are speed, density, non-volatility, lower power consumption, and reduction of errors due to alpha radiation. “NRAM is as dense as DRAM, as fast as SRAM, and as non-volatile as flash memory,” he says. That just about covers the gamut of memory chips as can be seen in the table below.





Source: The Nanotech Pioneers: Where are they taking us?






Except of course, for MRAM, which was covered in the last post. What does MRAM proponent, Daniel Baker think of NRAM? “From what I know… [NRAM] is interesting technology, but we that believe MRAM is closer to commercialization, more producible, and more scalable than carbon nanotube memory,” says Baker, CEO of NVE Corp.

Nantero does have some adherents, however. LSI Logic is seeking to integrate the NRAM concept into its CMOS technology. LSI will have the option of using NRAM to replace S-RAM in its ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) chips. NRAM chips started rolling off of LSI’s production lines in May 2004, converting its engineers into nanotech believers. BAE Systems is working with Nantero to develop NRAM chips for defense and aerospace application. Nantero is also participating with Carbon Nanotechnologies, Inc. and CASE-Southwestern Missouri State in a $4.5 million program to develop radiation hardened NRAM chips to replace the SRAM chips currently used for applications in space. Schmergel suspects that NRAM memory might be stable in the face of an electromagnetic pulse engendered by an atomic blast, but the company has yet to do the experiment.


NRAM chips exploits the flexibility, thermal an electrical conductivity and durability of nanotubes. In the “off” state, the nanotube is suspended over an electrode. In the “on” state, the suspended nanotube bends to touch the electrode. Both states are stable. Switching is done by electrical fields. The off and on states can represent the 1’s and 0’s of computer memory. Eventually, Nantero hopes that NRAM will replace even computer hard drives, which means they will be instant-on devices.

Nantero also believes that nanotubes have a place in logic devices. Partnership talks are underway in this effort.

A number of prominent venture capitalists are supporting Nantero, including Globescan Capital Partners, Charles River Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Stata Venture Partners, and Harris & Harris Group. The company also has some impressive industry leaders on its board. Among these are Alex D’Arbeloff, cofounder of Teradyne, and now chairman of MIT, and former IBM executive O. B. Bilous, who is now chairman of the board for International SEMATECH, a global consortium of semiconductor manufactures.

Like NVE Corp., Nantero has no intentions of building a fab and making its own chips. Instead, the company will rely on royalties from its intellectual property, a business model for the semiconductor industry already pioneered successfully by Rambus and Qualcomm. Schmergel expect the first commercial quantity NRAM chips to be marketed in two to three years.

Nano and SEMI Mix it up in Chi Town

Next week I will be blogging from the Windy City, at the NanoCommerce and SEMI NanoForum (www.nanocommerceforum.com). This is not just another nanoconference because it mixes talks from the leading lights of the nanotech with those of big shots from IBM, Motorola, Texas Instruments, ASML etc. The conference will feature: Northwestern’s Chad Mirkin, founder of Nanosphere and NanoInk; James von Ehr, Founder and CEO of Zyvex; Jim O’ Conner, Vice President Technology, Motorola; David Macdonald, CEO of Nanomix; and the Big Daddy of Dendrimers, Don Tomalia, among others.

The semiconductor industry forms a big part of the famous one trillion dollar nanotech industry predicted by NSF, a figure that has been seen and raised by Lux Research. Of course, in some ways, the semiconductor industry is already nanotech-enabled, in that nanoparticles are used to polish silicon wafers and chips, and lithographic feature sizes on commercial chips have now cracked the 100 nm barrier. But this is all normal, everyday top-down engineering. It is not the type of quantumly weird, molecular scale, bottoms-up stuff that the elite would refer to as true nanotech.

But chips of the future are going to be different. The semiconductor understands that the way of the future is down still further in scale: Moore’s law demands it.


Memory

The first “true nanotech” chips will probably be for memory storage. Today, the memory market is fragmented because of the various types of memory required by different products.

DRAM, or dynamic access memory, is the type of memory chip used in computers and accounts for the biggest market, about $24 billion in 2004. SRAM, or static random access memory, is a conventional memory chip that is faster than DRAM but lower in density; it used is for operations such as digital signal processing in cellphones and caches in computers, where speed is critical. This was about a $3 billion dollar market in 2004. Flash memory is non-volatile, which means it doesn’t go away when the power goes off. Flash memory is used in cell phones to store data and in memory sticks, personal digital assistants (PDAs), MP3 players and digital cameras. This was a $12 billion market in 2004 and growing rapidly.

There are two types of nanotech memory chips, called MRAM and NRAM. that haven’t made it to prime time yet, but have the potential to replace all the others.

Ever since Thomas Edison created the electric light, the electronics industry has relied on the fact that negatively charged electrons flow naturally through a metallic conductor toward a positively charged pole. MRAM (for magnetoresistive RAM), on the other hand, relies on a quantum property of electrons called “spin.” Spin comes in two flavors, ingeniously called “up” and “down.” MRAM uses these two states to encode the 1’s and 0’s of computer memory. According to Daniel Baker, CEO of NVE Corp., MRAM will have the speed of SRAM, the density of DRAM, and the nonvolatility of flash memory. Therefore, the whole $40 billion memory market is a target.

NVE Corp. held the early lead in MRAM development and has licensed its technology to Cypress Semiconductor and Freescale Semiconductor (by way of Motorola). Both Freescale and Cypress have produced modest quantities of MRAM chips. But NVE Corp. received a setback to its plans for monetizing its technology when Cypress announced in April that it would discontinue MRAM development. Moreover, a Who’s Who of semiconductor manufacturers, including Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Infineon, NEC, Samsung, Sony, Taiwan, and Toshiba are reportedly interested in developing their own versions of MRAM.

NRAM will be explained in the next post….

The Serial Entrepreneur

Sitting, waiting for his presentation at TNano2, Larry Bock looks nervous. He fidgets. A Styrofoam cup in front of him has been chewed all the way around the edge, displaying a nice even pattern of tooth marks. What does Bock have to be nervous about?

Bock is, after all, the most serial of serial entrepreneurs; he is founder or co-founder of Neurocrine Biosciences, Athena Neurosciences, Argonaut Technologies, Onyx Pharmaceuticals, Genpharm International, Caliper Technologies, and Illumina, not to mention Pharmacopoeia, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and Ariad Pharmaceuticals. These are all successful biotechnology companies. His latest company is Nanosys, Inc. The fact that Bock has now shifted his focus to nanotechnology is as good a reason as any to take nanotech seriously.

Later, in an e-mail exchange, I ask Bock for the personal characteristics common to successful entrepreneurs. I offer that one personality quirk of such people is an almost pathological optimism. Bock lists only one--”fear of failure.” So maybe that’s it; the yin and yang of entrepreneurship. An overwhelming optimism lets the entrepreneur face the long odds of starting a successful company, the money hassles, the vulture capitalists and all the obstacles along the way. It’s the fear of failure that drives one to put in the twelve hour days, checking all the details, avoiding the technology risk, running through all the possible scenarios.

Bock looks more poised when speaking than while waiting to speak. Still, he seems more geek than businessman. His presentation lacks that smooth, hucksterish quality of so many tech CEOs.

Some tech companies, he points out, start with a single good idea and one good application. But these are not Larry Bock companies. His companies have:

1) A platform technology
2) Multiple corporate partners through which to leverage the platform
3) Not one product to develop, but a product portfolio to diversify risk.

PLASTICS!

The model for the nanotechnology is not semiconductor industry or even the biotech industry, as many have said, but the chemical industry, says Bock. He plays a clip of The Graduate to make the point that nanotech is the “plastics” industry of the 21st century. Nanotech is even more plastic than plastics as it lets you control the physical, magnetic, optical thermal and electrical properties of a material.

Early on, Nanosys raised some eyebrows with its aggressive acquisition of intellectual property from many of the best and brightest scientists in the nanotech pantheon: Louis Brus, Charles Lieber, James Heath, Hongkun Park, Paul Alivisatos, Piedong Yang, and Moungi Bawendi. That investment has yielded over 400 patents and patent applications licensed to Nanosys, most revolving around inorganic thin films, nanowires, quantum dots.

No one, says Bock, knows yet what the killer app for nanotechnology will be.
However, Nanosys seems to be focused on components and subsystems for the electronics industry: LEDs, transistors, oscillators and computer memory. The nanocomponents of the future will be incorporated into devices in an easy manufacturing technology like reel-to-reel manufacturing; something like the way wallpaper is printed. Nanosys hopes to have revenue-producing products by next year.

One Nanosys product that is near to commercial development is a chemical analysis chip that features a nanostructured surface that enables small molecule analysis with high sensitivity.

Another potential high value application for nanotech in the near future is a flexible solar cell. According to Bock, nano-enabled solar cells will soon produce electricity at $1.00/watt and be competitive with fossil fuels. I only hope you can run an SUV with them.

Nanosys doesn’t plan to live on licensing revenues from its extensive patent portfolio—it intends to be the GE or IBM of the future—by capturing 25% to 50% of the value added through its nanotech products and processes. It will be a manufacturer. How do you do that in Palo Alto? Isn’t that the most expensive place in the world to manufacture anything? Not to worry, explains Bock, the whole point of nanotech is small size. It doesn’t take a multibillion dollar fab to make a whole lot of nano-sized components.

Nanosys kept the nanotech community on edge most of last year when its IPO was first put on hold and then finally shelved. Bock claims it costs $3 million a year just to satisfy the regulatory requirements of being a public company and so doesn’t plan to tap the public markets until he can get a big payoff.


Do you want to grow up to be a serial entrepreneur?

So, do you want to be the next Larry Bock? I ask him for the secret of creating a successful tech company. Here is the recipe: 1) a powerful platform technology; 2) a sense of urgency; 3) scrappiness; 4) employee empowerment; and 5) an ounce of dumb luck.

As for Bock, when asked whether he would start a series of nanotech companies to go with this stable of biotechs, he replies “I don’t have enough hair left.”

How green is my valley...

Everybody is wondering where the nanotech equivalent of Silicon Valley will appear. Californians are banking on Silicon Valley itself; Texans are thinking maybe Austin, around the University of Texas; New Yorkers are hoping the Valley will coalesce around the Albany Institute of Nanotechnology and Applied Sciences. Build it and they will come; that is also the thinking of Virginia, which chose to locate the nanotech-oriented Institute for Advanced Learning and Research in the midst of a former tobacco field in economically depressed Danville. So far they have also lured Luna Nanoworks, a nanomaterials company, run by C-Sixty founder Stephen Wilson, presumably with the use of some serious financial incentives. Still it seems to me that the original SiliconValley was an emergent phenomenon. By definition, something that is emergent cannot be predicted from initial conditions. The shape of the requisite seed crystal and the concentration of critical components cannot be known beforehand.

Think nanotech, and my home state, Tennessee, does not immediately spring to mind. Not that we don’t have some wonderful stuff here. Beautiful streams and lakes. Deer and wild turkey in abundance. A vibrant music industry around Nashville. But high tech industry so far has been absent, despite some natural advantages, like a central location on the shipping routes, and the presence of some fine research institutions like Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Vanderbilt University. So I was pleasantly surprised to hear about the TNano2 conference (http://www.technologycouncil.com/news.php?viewStory=926) put on by Vanderbilt on October 6th in Nashville. Among those giving presentations were Nanosys CEO Larry Bock, and venture capitalist Clint Bybee, co-founder of Arch Ventures. Sarah Whisenant, from Sun Micro, was scheduled but had to cancel at the last minute. I promise to talk more about Bock in the next post. The subject of the day, however, is diamonds. Jim Davidson (www.vuse.vanderbilt.edu/~jld/persinfo.htm ), Professor of Electrical Engineering at Vanderbilt gave a talk at TNano2 that was all about these enchanting rocks.

Diamonds are nanotechnologist’s best friend…

So, I’m sure you’ve heard about Drexlerian dream of diamondoid mechanosynthesis. Drexler’s little robots may never materialize, but he and his followers got one thing right: diamond is an excellent nanomaterial. The standard way to make diamonds is to depend on Ma Nature as she expends tons of pressure on a coal deposit for a billion years or so. But that’s not the only way to do it. These days diamonds can be “cultured” through the application of a mere 58,000 atmospheres of pressure at about 1300 degrees Centigrade. A Florida based company called Gemesis will sell you gem-quality cultured diamonds in white, yellow or blue.

Huge quantities of heat and pressure is a brute force way of doing something. This an anathema to the discerning nanotechnologist like Jim Davidson; he uses a more subtle method called chemical vapor deposition (CVD). In this process, a diamond chip is enlarged by carbon gas, one atom at a time (without the need for an assembler) under suitable conditions of temperature and pressure. CVD is not exactly new; it has been used for years to make diamond coatings and small industrial diamonds. And then, of course, there is the revolutionary diamond-coated frying pan; a 12.5 inch pan can now be obtained for only $99.00 (http://www.swiss.diamond.com/ ). No more will we have to deal with scratched up Teflon.

The CVD process has been recently improved. Apollo Diamond, a startup that is the brainchild of Bryant Linares, hopes to make a 2 carat CVD gem quality diamond this year using CVD. De Beers, with its near monopoly on mined diamonds, is not amused. Linares is more interested in use of diamonds in electronics than the flashy ice, however.Jim Davidson, too doesn’t care a lot about diamond gems; he is into more useful stuff, like diamond-based MEMS sensors, resistors, capacitors, diodes and cold cathodes. Like its relative, the carbon nanotube, diamond has intrinsic properties that are hard to beat, like electrical conductivity, heat conductivity and unmatched hardness and durability. Diamonds can also be doped to turn them into semiconductors; CVD diamond has even been proposed as a very heat conductive, durable replacement for silicon in making chips.

Davidson also mentioned my choice as the killer app for CVD diamonds--the thermoelectric generator. Diamonds are coated onto a surface within a vacuum device. An anode is placed on the opposite side. Heat up the diamond side and electrons are released from the pointy ends of the diamonds and collected at the anode. Electricity is generated directly from heat with no moving parts. With gas and heating oil going through the roof, pricewise, and the earth overheating, what could be a better idea than a device that turns heat into electrical energy? This diamond-studded thermoelectric generator could be the basis of a co-generation device or a solar cell.

Steve Edwards

The writer of this blog, Steven Edwards, is a writer/analyst/consultant. His first book, The Nanotech Pioneers: Where are they taking us? will be published by Wiley VCH in 2006. Edwards received his doctorate in biology from the University of California, San Diego. He has worked as a research scientist at Salk Institute, Burnham Institute, and had an appointment as an assistant professor in the biochemistry department of Meharry Medical College. He works free lance as an industry analyst for BCC, and was also editor of Nano/Bio Convergence News (now alas, defunct). He has helped BCC organize a number of technical conferences on aspects of nanotechnology and nanobiotechnology. Edwards is a guest editor and frequent contributor to Redzone Profits, a web-based investment newsletter. He will respond to e-mails as time permits sent to steven.alan.edwards@gmail.com.

The Nanotech Pioneers: Where are they taking us?

Hype, hope, or horror? A vivid look at nanotechnology, written by an insider and experienced science writer.The variety of new products and technologies that will spin out of nanoscience is limited only by the imagination of the scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs drawn to this new field. Steve Edwards concentrates on the reader's self interest: no military gadgets, wild fantasies of horror nanobot predators and other sci-fi stuff, but presents a realistic view of how this new field of technology will affect people in the near future. He is in close contact with many pioneers in nanotechnology, and includes their backgrounds to allow readers, especially college students considering a career in the field, to better imagine themselves in such positions.

As technology does not develop in a vacuum, this book also looks at the social, political and economic changes attendant upon the development of nanotechnology.For the science-interested general public as well as chemists, students, lecturers, chemical organizations, materials scientists, journalists, politicians, industry, physicists, and biologists.Nanotech Pioneers can be ordered now at http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-3527312900.html