OTHER ELECTRONICS & NANOTECHNOLOGY
UPDATE
February 2011
McIlvaine Company
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Brunel University Launches Manufacturing Research Centre
University of Minnesota’s Nanofabrication Center
Penn Breaks Ground for Nanotechnology Center
Nanovations Opens Branch in Bahrain
U.S., UK Join Forces for Nano Safety
Science & Innovation Team, British Consulate General in Houston
Avo Photonics Expands Cleanroom Production Facility
Brunel University has launched its Collaborative Research Network (CRN) in Innovative Manufacturing, which is aimed at giving UK manufacturers a leading edge in the global marketplace.
According to Brunel, the CRN will provide UK industry with access to the university’s manufacturing expertise and create new opportunities for innovation in knowledge transfer, cross-disciplinary research and industrial collaboration.
Prof Kai Cheng, leader of the Innovation Manufacturing CRN, said: ‘In the last few decades, manufacturing has moved from comprising those activities that take place within the factory walls to a multi-skilled, multi-disciplinary cycle of activities combining research, design and development, production, logistics, service provision and end-of-life management.
‘Many different players and partners up and down the value chain are needed to undertake these activities. As a result, it has become difficult for all but the largest players to assemble the skills, knowledge and technologies needed to develop new products and services successfully.
‘The Innovative Manufacturing CRN will enable UK manufacturers of all sizes to access in one place the expertise they need.’
Dr Richard Bateman, co-coordinator of the Innovative Manufacturing CRN, added that, despite widespread public perception, manufacturing remains critical to the UK’s economy.
‘Manufacturing accounts for 14–15 per cent of the UK’s GDP and 50–55 per cent of exports and employs three million people. Most people are surprised to hear that the UK is the sixth-largest manufacturer in the world.
‘The Innovative Manufacturing CRN will support the aim of the government and the Technology Strategy Board to move UK manufacturing “up the value chain” into the high-value, high-technology areas that will provide sustainable and long-term growth for UK manufacturing industries.’
The CRN will draw on the expertise of the 500 researchers working in manufacturing across the university, including those from Brunel’s specialist research institutes that include the Liquid Metals Engineering Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre; the Multidisciplinary Assessment of Technology Centre for Healthcare; and the Brunel Innovation Centre run with TWI.
University of Minnesota says a proposed $80M nanotech lab is about more than science. It's about jobs, too.
The university is trying to secure state funding for a new experimental physics and nanotechnology facility.
University officials and leaders in Minnesota's science and business communities say that facility is key to keeping the state competitive in the burgeoning field of nanotechnology, the science of manipulating molecules in a world 100,000 times smaller than the thickness of a sheet of paper to produce new materials, devices and structures.
"Nano, in a nutshell, is just making things really small," said Stephen Campbell, director of the U's Nanofabrication Center.
"It's why you can put a cell phone in your pocket rather than lugging it around in a suitcase," said Steven Couch, dean of the university's College of Science and Technology.
This small science is, however, a big job creator. The U.S. Labor Department predicts nanotech jobs will increase tenfold — from about 200,000 now to 2 million within a few years.
Couch said a new state-of-the-art building is vital to advancing research and training Minnesota's next generation of high-tech workers. "We want to educate the workers of tomorrow using the technologies of tomorrow," he said.
In addition, the new facilities would enable the U to attract top-notch faculty, researchers and graduate students, compete for more research grants and collaborate with growing industries in the state and nation.
The job-creation pitch appears to be working at the Capitol. Gov. Mark Dayton has bought into it. He requested $51.3 million for the project in the $1 billion public works program he proposed to the Legislature this month.
The physics-nanotech building would cost $80 million. The state typically covers two-thirds of the cost of the university's projects, with the U and its donors financing the remaining third.
It would provide 40 new research laboratories and house 200 faculty, graduate students and visiting researchers. It would offer 43,000 square feet of physics labs and support space and 15,000 square feet for nanotechnology, including a 5,000-square-foot "cleanroom" that would be virtually dust-free.
The U has a 20-year-old cleanroom that enables 250 users to conduct research on hard materials, Couch said. The new cleanroom would double the U's research capacity and enable researchers to work on biological materials as well as hard materials.
The new structure would replace the Tate physics lab, which was built in 1923 — the same year as the original Yankee Stadium — and is so obsolete it cannot be renovated to meet current needs, Couch said.
Minnesota is falling behind other states in nanotech research, including Indiana, Ohio, Illinois and Michigan in the Midwest, he said.
The U now receives around $40 million a year in physics and nanotech research grants. Couch predicted the new building would enable the school to attract an additional $4 million to $5 million a year.
He said it also would mean about 100 new jobs — 70 for U faculty, staff and students and 30 more for private-industry researchers.
Bob Hoerr, a physician, biochemist and co-founder of Nanocopoeia, a St. Paul company developing nanotech drug-delivery systems, said the labs would spin off many more businesses like his.
His company collaborates with university engineering and medical school faculty, and it has trained and hired many U students.
Nanocopoeia also buys services from the U, using $250,000-$500,000 electron microscopes Hoerr's company couldn't afford on its own. "It makes a small company larger than itself," he said.
The new building would educate the work force and provide the research capacity Minnesota companies need to get started and grow, Hoerr said.
He cited an analysis commissioned by MN Nano, a private coalition of nanoscience advocates, that estimated the U project would deliver a $200 million return on the state's investment.
It also would create a lot of good jobs, most paying $60,000 to $80,000 a year, he said.
"This is really an opportunity to start a renaissance for a rising mix of investments," he said.
Couch has been promoting the building for six years.
"If we don't get it this year, I'll be back next year lobbying for it as hard as I can," he said.
Sandia National Laboratories will help Mexican engineering students learn to design microelectromechanical devices (MEMS), according to a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between Sandia and the University of Guadalajara.
10 Mexican professors and 3 Sandia researchers at a SUMMit design course for MEMS devices held at Sandia in December 2009.
The rationale for the agreement is that the economic well-being of Mexico is a national security issue for the United States, said Sandia project lead Ernest Garcia.
Sandia's SUMMiT V fabrication process will permit students to design MEMS devices that employ five layers of silicon. Each layer adds another level of complexity to the design. SUMMiT V permits advanced systems created on moveable platforms to be taller (up to 12 micrometers high), stiffer, and more mechanically forceful and robust than those created by earlier processes.
"The University of Guadalajara is like the state of California’s higher education system," Garcia said. "It supports a number of universities throughout the Mexican state of Jalisco. Its leadership wants to use SUMMiT as the basis for a future graduate program in MEMS."
"MEMS manufacturing will leverage many of Mexico’s traditional strengths in electronic manufacturing," Herrera said. "Sandia is in a position to help the University of Guadalajara system migrate to a state-of-the-art MEMS design capability."
"If we could help Mexico improve its research and development capabilities, it would help stabilize its economy," he said. Garcia sees the new collaboration with the U. of Guadalajara as a long-term investment in the future of the Mexican economy. "It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon," Garcia said, mentioning potential barriers like U.S. controls on exporting technology and intellectual property (IP) to foreign countries.
"Ultimately, the U.S. may be the biggest beneficiary if the MOU contributes to the vitality of the Mexican economy and thereby the stability of the U.S.-Mexican border," said Gil Herrera, director of Sandia’s Microsystems Science, Technology and Components Center. "We believe that Sandia will also benefit from the relationship, as we will have new minds challenging the design envelope of our SUMMiT MEMS technology." Herrera is in charge of Sandia’s activities in support of the collaboration.
Steve Rottler, Sandia’s vice president for basic technologies, signed the agreement for Sandia. He said, "The commitment and enthusiasm of the University of Guadalajara faculty and leadership will greatly help this collaboration to advance technologies vital to the economies and security of both countries."
Similar efforts by Sandia are also underway at Mexican universities in Juarez, Veracruz and Mexico City, as well as the Puebla-based National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics, and Electronics (INAOE).
The agreement extends earlier work by Sandia that played a role in creating a Bi-National Sustainability Laboratory at Santa Teresa, NM, near the border between the United States and Mexico. That effort was intended to examine problems on both sides of the border, such as water rights. The initial goal of the Sustainability Laboratory was to foster research efforts that could ultimately create border industries and jobs to staunch the one-way flow of workers from Mexico to the United States. That effort is now directed by an independent nonprofit corporation supported by a variety of national, state, and corporate sponsors.
The Guadalajara program is expected to expand an existing Sandia-led national MEMS project for Mexico. That country has spent $2 million to fund the project. "Last December, a number of Mexican professors took our MEMS course, licensed our design software, and purchased 100 silicon chips with their MEMS designs," Garcia said.
The Guadalajara agreement is different, Garcia said, because it (and Sandia efforts with other Mexican universities) is in the interior of Mexico rather than near the border.
"We hope eventually to have Mexican universities compete in Sandia’s University Alliance annual MEMS competition for the most imaginative or practical designs," Garcia said. The high-spirited contest, open to institutional members of the Sandia-led MEMS University Alliance program, provides an arena for student engineers to hone their skills in designing and using microdevices. Student contest winners get to see their designs become reality when they are fabricated at Sandia’s MEMS facilities. Last year’s winners were Texas Tech and the University of Utah for creating, respectively, the world’s smallest chess set and a micro barber shop that serviced a single human hair.
A delegation of Mexican professors from Guadalajara will visit Albuquerque in spring 2011 to confer with researchers at Sandia and possibly the University of New Mexico. The trips will be funded by state of Jalisco’s technology office. Albuquerque and Guadalajara are sister cities.
Sandia National Laboratories is a multiprogram laboratory operated and managed by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies, and economic competitiveness.
The $80 million Center, named for Penn alumnus and Trustee Krishna Singh, will provide microscopy laboratories, optics labs and 10,000 square feet of environmentally controlled clean rooms to researchers at Penn and in the region. Singh, who provided a $20 million naming gift for the Center, is founder, president and chief executive officer of the energy-technology company Holtec International, based in Marlton, N.J.
The state-of-the-art facility, developed jointly by SAS and Penn Engineering, will place the University at the forefront of the emerging and vital field of nanoscience, says Eduardo Glandt, dean of Penn Engineering, by serving as a regional hub of multi-disciplinary fundamental and translational research, education and innovation.
"This facility will allow researchers in academia and business to venture into this transformative technology," he says.
"We are thrilled to be taking this important step toward providing our faculty with access to state-of-the-art resources, and even more thrilled with the opportunities that the Singh Center will create for scientists from Penn Engineering, SAS, and elsewhere to collaborate," says Rebecca Bushnell, dean of SAS.
"Science is, after all, done by people, and as the boundaries between scientific disciplines become increasingly blurred, this kind of collaboration is what will keep Penn at the cutting edge of research."
The 100,000 square-foot, L-shaped Center is being designed by the New York-based firm Weiss/Manfredi. The structure will feature walls of glass and steel and is expected to be one of the largest nanotechnology centers in the region. "Its close proximity to a world-class medical school will facilitate advances in medicine and the health sciences," Glandt says.
Continuing its international growth, Nanovations Pty Ltd has opened a distribution branch in Bahrain.
Situated in the heart of Bahrain, Nanovations GCC, will serve customers not only in Bahrain, but in all the GCC Countries.
This expansion is a direct result of growing demand for functional nanotechnology coatings and reliable building maintenance products and services across Bahrain and the GCC.
Nanovations GCC is committed to provide quality and new Nanotechnology materials and unmatched service levels to building managers and building maintenance professionals in the region.
The new Bahrain branch, and its team of engineers, will support customers by providing nanotechnology coating solutions and technical support and application advise. The excellent, world class transport infrastructure, developed by the Bahrain government, enables Nanovations Pty. Ltd. to deliver goods with the shortest possible lead times to the GCC.
With the opening of this facility Nanovations extend its commitment to supply high-tech products and services to professional building management companies on a international levels.
Nanovations is looking forward to establishing and maintaining mutually beneficial, long-term relationships with our professional partners, and customers in a region that has one of the highest demand on protective coatings worldwide.
In California, Composites Horizons Inc. (CHI, Covina, Calif.) announced that it is undergoing a major expansion program to support recently signed new contracts. CHI is part of the Aerostructures & Composites division of the U.K.-based Hampson Group. Prior to the expansion, CHI’s facilities were housed in two adjacent buildings in Covina. A third building, adjacent to the other two, will provide an additional 41,000 sq. ft. (3,809 sq. meters) of space, which represents an 82 percent increase. Renovations of the existing buildings include a 2,300-sq. ft. (214 sq. meters) expansion of a polyimide cleanroom. The expanded site also includes space to accommodate machining, final assembly, trimming, coating, inspection and measuring operations, with additional room to support projected growth. The three-building complex will give CHI the opportunity to centralize all its operations, including fabrication, assembly and delivery functions, as well as management and engineering offices and accounting services. The project includes an investment in new processing equipment, including a 6-axis FIDIA K414 CNC mill with rotary table, supplied by FIDIA SpA (San Mauro Torinese, Italy), a Flow waterjet trim center, built by Flow International (Kent, Wash.) as well as several pieces of part inspection equipment.
Carbodeon shall accelerate its business development in Carbon-based nanomaterials technology and invest in expansion of manufacturing capacity of its Nicanite® Carbon Nitride and uDiamond® nanodiamond products. Enso will also bring its own nanomaterials products and technologies into Carbodeon's portfolio. Carbodeon will strengthen its focus in disruptive nanomaterials technology with manufacturing base in Finland and global customer service.
"Partnering with Enso allows us to exploit our technology faster in the rapidly emerging nanomaterials markets", says Dr. Asko Vehanen, CEO of Carbodeon. "Our focus is selected key applications, where we expect that our partnership with Enso generates new competitive solutions through parties' unique combination of technology and skills."
Majority of Carbodeon's shareholders have sold their shares to Enso as a part of the deal structure. This includes the largest previous shareholder - Picodeon Ltd Oy. Carbodeon shall maintain and strengthen its close business relationship with Picodeon, as parties shall jointly continue to exploit Carbodeon's Nicanite® in Picodeon's Coldab® deposition technology. Asko Vehanen will maintain his role as a CEO of Carbodeon. Dr. Vesa Myllymäki, will assume Carbodeon's CTO position on full time basis.
Kevin R. Lewis, Director Enso Advisory Ltd: "We believe that Carbodeon poses a strategic fit to our strategy for creation of a world leader in Advanced Materials industry. Moreover, Finland, in our view, is a leading innovation powerhouse in Europe with a very attractive climate for innovation".
Tekes - the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation has supported Carbodeon from its beginning to develop carbon based nanomaterials. Enso's investment is regarded as an excellent step to accelerate the development of the company
Environmental and scientific agencies in the United States and the United Kingdom have formed a joint $5 million scientific effort to develop new risk-management tools that government officials can use to effectively regulate nanomaterials.
The Nanomaterial Bioavailability and Environmental Exposure (Nano-BEE) Consortia includes investigators from three universities each in the U.S. and the UK
"Regulators need tools that will allow them to look at a wide variety of nanomaterials and rapidly identify the most significant potential problems for a specific nanomaterial in a specific location," said lead U.S. investigator Vicki Colvin of Rice University. "This consortia will model how the local environmental chemistry influences the availability of nanomaterials. We expect to see a lot of variability: What is safe in one area may be unsafe someplace else."
Colvin, Rice's Pitzer-Schlumberger Professor of Chemistry and director of Rice's Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology, said the consortia hopes to produce a "plug-and-play" tool that will allow regulators to enter information about the size and type of nanomaterial, local water-chemistry conditions, soil types and the like. The tool would then tell how much of a particular product could be safely released in that location, which is just the sort of information regulators need.
Regulation based on sound science and validated models will help accelerate nanotechnology innovation, Colvin said. "The worst thing for an emerging technology is to be faced with uncertainty. This consortium will provide a predictable and quantitative framework for regulation that companies and the public can have confidence in," she said.
"Nanotechnology holds great potential to improve the quality of all our lives and to have a revolutionary impact on many disciplines," said co-investigator Pedro Alvarez, the George R. Brown Professor of Engineering and chair of Rice's Department of Engineering. "But unfortunately, many promising technologies and policies have created unintended collateral damage in the past. It's important that we take a proactive approach to risk-assessment."
"This collaborative project will provide the scientific underpinning for models to understand where nanoparticles go in the environment under what conditions and how they affect environmental organisms once there," said lead UK investigator Jamie Lead, a professor of environmental nanoscience at the University of Birmingham. "The outcomes will have huge importance for the safety and sustainability of the nanotechnology industry."
The UK's Science and Innovation team in Houston, part of the Foreign and Commonwealth office, helped facilitate interactions between scientists at Rice and in the UK with workshops and trans-Atlantic visits. May Akrawi, HM Consul and head of the team, said, "We are delighted to hear of this award and look forward to continuing the long tradition of Rice's partnership in nanotechnology research with the UK."
The consortia's U.S. partners include Rice, Clemson University and the University of California, Davis. UK partners include the University of Birmingham, Napier University and the University of Exeter, as well as the Natural History Museum of London.
Colvin said the consortia hopes to deliver speedy results by modifying existing and accepted scientific models of how nanoparticles circulate through biological systems. "Silver gives us a good starting place," she said. "If we could capitalize on 20 years of silver bioavailability models -- which are already being used to set regulatory policy in the U.S. -- we could save a lot of time."
Kristen Kulinowski, a senior faculty fellow in chemistry at Rice, is a co-investigator. Rice's Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology is coordinating the effort at the university.
The project, part of an $11 million U.S.-UK nanotechnology research program, is jointly funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. National Science Foundation and the UK Natural Environment Research Council, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, Medical Research Council, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and Department of Health and Environment Agency.
The Science & Innovation Team in Houston is part of the United Kingdom's Foreign and Commonwealth Office network of global science attachés. They work to facilitate collaborations between science and innovation providers and users in the United Kingdom and the United States in industry, academia and research institutions. In addition, they keep U.K. policymakers fully informed about research and policy developments in the U.S., as well as promote the U.K. as a world-class leader in science and innovation. The Science Network also reports on policy developments, strategy and emerging priorities and facilitates international negotiations and collaborations in such areas as climate change, stem cell research, nanotechnology and low-carbon technologies.
Avo Photonics, specialists in opto-electronic system design, packaging and manufacturing, announced a 7,000 square foot addition to their cleanroom production facility. Furthermore, Avo has increased its corporate engineering facilities by 3,000 square feet and is actively filling new positions.
Jeff Harris, Production Manager at Avo Photonics, comments; "We are extremely excited to have expanded our manufacturing facilities. The addition was required as result of an increase in existing customer's opto-electronic production demands and a significant accrual of customers whose Avo generated prototypes are moving to volume production."
The new space will support the continued streamlining of current manufacturing processes, increase flexibility, and assist in high-volume production. "In order to support our tremendous progress in the military and medical industries, the expansion was absolutely necessary and critical to Avo's continued growth and success," comments Dr. Jeff Perkins, Avo's VP of Operations. He adds; "Given our ISO and ITAR managed operations as well as strict intellectual property control procedures, an increasing number of clients are utilizing Avo's U.S.-based manufacturing capabilities."
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