Here are the highlights from Session 6 – Nano-Electronics from day two of the IEEE San Francisco Bay Area Nanotechnology Council 6th Annual Symposium“Nanotechnology: State of the Art & Applications”
Note: I will post the the link for the slides once it becomes available.
Vijendra Sahi, VP Corporate Development and GM of the QD Soleil division, Nanosys, Inc.
“From Concept to Creation: The Journey from R&D to Everyday Products.”
- Four main steps on this journey:
- Understanding your rationale. The Industrial Revolution was about process innovation in moving raw materials to products. While the current Materials Revolution is about architected materials.
- Establishing your platform. Nanosys has two platforms – nanowire synthesis & nanocrystal production. These platforms combined with assembly, interface, and formats technology results in new applications. (See product “grid” slides for examples.)
- Understand your Applications
- Battery anode & Quantum Dot – main products to be launched this year.
- Quantum Dot Remote Phosphors (QDRP) – instead of YAG phosphor backlight (which tends to give yellow shifted light) they use blue LED to build displays with true RGB. They tune the QD to the match the filter to minimize the loss resulting in a more efficient display than OLEDs. Lead partner is LG Innotek (Jan 21, 2010 announcement).
- Battery anode is a part of their Energy Storage Solutions. Better than 2x capacity improvement using a 10% additive in Li+ battery anode. Working on automotive technology since in 2020 the market size is estimated to be > $70B.
- Market timing is important to align with the eco-system. The market needs to be sufficiently mature to be ready to adopt new technology.
- $498 B market for architected nano-materials / nano-intermediates in 2015 (Lux Research)
- 61% CAGR through 2015
Questions:
What about FLASH memory? A: Their technology will permit scaling beyond 25 nm along with life greater than 1 M write cycles. For current 35 nm FLASH, life is between 10 and 100K cycles. This would most likely be used for solid state hard drives
What is the table on Displays comparing? A: Comparison table is only really showing the data on the backlight.
Dr. Deli Wang, Professor ECE, UCSD “Nanowires for Nanoelectronics Applications”
- Nanowire (NW) photodetectors – high sensitivity and internal gain.
- Using nano-imprint lithography to build Nanowires with 400x the sensitivity of commercial Si PiN diodes.
- Can build photodetector integrated with a solar cell. Provides low dark current and photo voltaic with high photoconductive gain & sensitivity.
- Showed concept of artificial retina.
- Addressable Si NW photodetector array with a cross bar geometry. It uses ITO at each end of the NW to form matrix permitting even greater sensitivity.
- NW make it possible to replace CMOS imager (photo diode with 3 support circuits) and use direct integration to CMOS permitting smaller imager pixel size.
- Photovoltaic –two examples of using nano wires for higher effiiciency:
- Vertical – better light harvesting since light enters from top which funnels light in to wire resulting in substantially higher power.
- Multiple junctions – multiple covalence bands to increase energy absorption.
High Technology Business Development - Ira Feldman 