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Nanotech Firms Find Room on Campus
Machines coated with hard, heat-resistant, low-friction diamond last longer and work more efficiently, Kane said. His company's specialty is depositing the diamond uniformly on silicon wafers, a key innovation toward someday making micro-machines entirely out of diamond.
Even Fortune 500 firms "that can afford to have their own research infrastructure are not comfortable enough to handle some new nanomaterials" and rely on academia to help them out, said Yoshio Nishi, a former chief scientist at Texas Instruments who heads the Stanford Nanotechnology Facility in California.
  Multispectral Imaging Inc. researcher Gregory Simelgor displays a prototype disk at the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., Thursday, Nov. 15, 2007. (AP Photo/Kevin Rivoli) (Kevin Rivoli - AP) TOOLBOXCOMMENT |
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Although the operating scale is infinitesimal _ a nanometer is roughly 10,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair _ the economic possibilities are colossal. By 2014, nanotechnology might generate $2.6 trillion of manufacturing output and employ 2 million people, Lux Research Inc. of New York estimates.
"It's the fixed costs that kill you," said Matt Miller, chief executive of Multispectral Imaging Inc. of Parsippany, N.J., which is renting lab time for two of his researchers at Cornell.
Miller's three-year-old startup is developing thermal imaging technology to help find people trapped in burning buildings.
In the 12 months through September, nearly 700 companies _ mostly small startups, but also some corporate titans _ paid for lab space and research help from the network, which is anchored by Cornell and Stanford and boasts top-of-the-line nanoengineering tools, techniques and staffs.
Business community members prefer the university labs to five similar ones owned by the federal government, which spends $1.4 billion on nanotechnology each year, because the government labs impose more restrictions.
"They're open to the outside community but require collaboration with Department of Energy researchers," Goldberg said.
"Many biotech or semiconductor-related technologies have emanated from university campuses as a result of our nation's investment in basic scientific research, and that's very much the case here too," said Sean Murdock of NanoBusiness Alliance, a trade association.
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