Site Map | Archives

Home › News › Local

University of New Mexico enjoys strong income from nanotech lab

By Sue Vorenberg
Monday, December 17, 2007

related linksMore Local
related linksMOST RECENT TRIB STORIES

related linksTRIB IN THE BLOGOSPHERE*

*Note: The Tribune does not create and is not responsible for the blogosphere's headlines and stories. These links to blogs talking about ABQTrib.com are automatically generated. Use them at your own risk.
STORY TOOLS

SHARE THIS STORY [?]

Tiny science is big business for the University of New Mexico.

Companies, government entities and universities from all over the country have rented lab space and equipment at the university's Center for High Tech Materials - which is part of the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network - to invent new microscopic products in areas such as optics, solar cells and computer chips.

The network, founded by the National Science Foundation in 2004, also has been good to UNM, bringing in more than $1 million in 2007 to help the university continue to operate its labs and maintain its unique collection of equipment, said center director Steven Brueck.

In January, UNM will apply to the science foundation for a five-year renewal to continue its part of the network, which has provided a valuable resource to not just large national groups, but also to small local businesses, Brueck said.

"This is a great way for small companies to get going," Brueck said. "We already have equipment for them to prove out their initial product concepts, which saves them money."

Twelve other nanolevel university laboratories across the country are also part of that network, allowing businesses to rent out nanotechnology lab space to make their mark in the millennium of the minuscule.

The Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network is funded in part with $14 million a year from the National Science Foundation.

Participating business owners say the network allows them to do more research than they would have without access to its resources. That research, to which the businesses retain all rights, will foster better products and industrial processes, bolstering the national economy, they say.

In New Mexico, participants get access to unique equipment that can lay out semiconductor chips very precisely - on an atom-by-atom scale - and devices that can print tiny writing on a variety of surfaces, Brueck said.

Some of UNM's big-name clients so far include Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories, Intel and GE. The list of local companies that have used the network is long, including Emcore, Cabot Superior Micropowders and CVI Laser.

The number of companies taking advantage of the network nationwide is growing 10 percent a year, said the National Science Foundation's senior engineering adviser, Lawrence Goldberg.

Host universities can apply the fees they receive from participants to anything they like, including beefing up their lab equipment.

In 2007, UNM earned $650,000 in fees from customers who used its facilities, Brueck said. It also received between $500,000 and $600,000 in grant money from the network.

"We use that money to make sure equipment is available when people come - a lot goes to maintenance and support," Brueck said, adding that the funds also pay for a handful of staff members.

Campus nanolabs around the country cater mainly to students, faculty and visiting scholars. They are built and run with public and private money.

In addition to UNM, participants are at Cornell, Stanford, Pennsylvania State, Harvard, Howard and North Carolina State universities, at Georgia Institute of Technology and at the universities of Michigan, Washington, California, Minnesota and Texas.

At one company in Ithaca, N.Y., Neil Kane and his staff had figured out how to rearrange methane gas to create industrial diamonds, but couldn't afford to build the highly specialized lab needed to develop such nanotechnology.

Instead, they paid for lab time at Cornell University's Nanoscale Science and Technology Facility.

Kane, president of Advanced Diamond Technologies near Chicago, said his company could not hope to turn its patented material into a cell-phone chip or a vision-restoring retinal implant if it couldn't rent lab time at Cornell.

"We have our own equipment for making the diamond," Kane said. "But all of the subsequent steps require access to a clean room, to tens of millions of dollars of equipment that no small company could ever afford. Many big companies can't afford it either."

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 micromachines entirely out of diamond.

Even though the universities must give up some use of the labs and don't get royalties from the business work done there, as they would from most academic work that later proved marketable, the arrangement seems to sit well with universities, businesses and government.

Mark Zupan, dean of the University of Rochester's Simon Graduate School of Business Administration in Rochester, N.Y., sees the tradeoff as promoting innovation. He said he worried only that businesses might try to use the universities' names or reputations to enhance the credibility of their research.

In response to concern among participating researchers about how research and technology move between academia and business, a group of researchers will explore and monitor the issue, according to the network's Web site.

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.

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 labs 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.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.