nanotimes 11-11/12 :: November/December 2011

11-12 / 2011

nanotimes November/December 2011

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Greetings!

Our edition of nanotimes is live now at:

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We have updated our watchlist at the end of the year and now list 206 non-public and public technology companies. The list is not static and will be amended on a regular basis depending on the companies' economic performance, their growth, innovation potential and their progress in product development. The key element is innovation.

Therefore, taking on Flibe Energy is not the result of a mistake but a conscious decision, even though companies working in this technology segment are having a hard time competing. The Company will develop small modular reactors based on liquid-fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) technology. The technology has been known for several decades and is based on Alvin Weinberg's theory. The founder of Flibe Energy, Kirk Sorensen, wants to further develop this approach. As long as we don't have a fundamental solution for the global thirst for energy like e.g. cold fusion all technical options should be examined.

The same applies to the company TerraPower with their Traveling Wave Reactor (TWR) that produces significantly smaller amounts of nuclear waste than conventional nuclear reactors. The TWR directly converts depleted uranium to usable fuel as it operates. Until today we have no solution for the huge amounts of depleted uranium, useless to today's reactors. TWR provides a solution. Especially the big European energy suppliers should invest in such companies because it is their nuclear waste, which they have no idea what to do with. Plus, the storage just costs money.

We say good-bye to an eventful and difficult year 2011. 2012 is likely to become even more exciting and demanding. But the same applied to 2008 and 2009, and we have survived these years as well. Especially smaller technology companies have done their homework in the last years, and have come out of the crisis even stronger. We would like to wish all our readers Happy Holidays and a prosperous New Year.

Thomas Ilfrich

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New Watchlist With 206 Companies
[pages 6-9]

We have updated our watchlist at the end of the year and now list 206 non-public and public technology companies. The list is not static and will be amended on a regular basis depending on the companies' economic performance, their growth, innovation potential and their progress in product development. The key element is innovation.

Fully Printed CNT Transistor Circuits for Displays [10]

Researchers from Aneeve Nanotechnologies have used low-cost ink-jet printing to fabricate the first circuits composed of fully printed back-gated and top-gated carbon nanotube-based electronics for use with OLED displays.

The startup includes collaborators from the departments of materials science and electrical engineering at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science and the department of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California.

Companies - [12-33]

e.g. HRL Laboratories has developed the world's lightest material with a density of 0.9 mg/cc, approximately one hundred times lighter than Styrofoam.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Micron Technology, Inc. announced that Micron will begin production of a new memory device built using the first commercial CMOS manufacturing technology to employ through-silicon vias (TSVs). IBM's advanced TSV chip-making process enables Micron's Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) to achieve speeds 15 times faster than today's technology.

Picosun Oy, Finland-based global manufacturer of state-of-the-art Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) equipment, has successfully scaled up several new, important ALD processes.

Imec together with its silicon photovoltaic industrial affiliation program partners Schott Solar, Total, Photovoltech, GDF-SUEZ, Solland Solar, Kaneka and Dow Corning, have demonstrated an excellent conversion efficiency of 23.3% on interdigitated back-contact (IBC) silicon solar cells.

New Magnetic-Field-Sensitive Alloy Could Find Use in Novel Micromechanical Devices [34]

A multi-institution team of researchers has combined modern materials research and an age-old metallurgy technique to produce an alloy that could be the basis for a new class of sensors and micromechanical devices controlled by magnetism. The alloy, a combination of cobalt and iron, is notable, among other things, for not using rare-earth elements to achieve its properties.

Materials scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) contributed precision measurements of the alloy's structure and mechanical properties to the project.

Solar Cells [36]

Researchers created the most efficient colloidal-quantum-dot solar cell. The research team's manufacturing process: a droplet of liquid containing the paintable semiconductor is placed on a slide. Rotating the slide in the horizontal plane causes the droplet to spread out, whence it dries.

A Hydrogenation Technique Triples Transistor Performance in Epitaxial Graphene [38]

A technique that uses hydrogen to improve transistor performance on real-world graphene devices has been demonstrated on the wafer-scale by researchers in Pennsylvania State University (USA). The researchers demonstrated a 3x improvement in electron mobility of epitaxial graphene grown on the silicon face of a 100mm silicon carbide wafer, as well as a similar improvement in radio-frequency transistor performance.

Insect Cyborgs Monitor Hazardous Situations [44]

Professor Khalil Najafi, and doctoral student Erkan Aktakka at the University of Michigan College of Engineering are finding ways to harvest energy from insects, and take the utility of the miniature cyborgs to the next level.

Detecting PETN [46]

Working in collaboration with the RhineMain Poly-technic, materials scientists at the TU Darmstadt, Germany, have developed an extremely sensitive explosives sensor that is capable of detecting even slight traces of the high-explosive chemical compound pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN).

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nanotimes 2010 - 2011

http://content.yudu.com/A1v0eq/Nanotimes11-2011/

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http://content.yudu.com/A1uq58/Nanotimes10-2011/

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http://content.yudu.com/A1uc5z/Nanotimes09-2011/

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