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Sunday, November 22, 
2:24 am

Nanotech shows promise for chip production

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Nanotechnology for lithographic printing is expected to be a boon in several electronics industry markets, and on top of healthy revenues for development tools relating  in the area, Molecular Imprints Inc. has raised $12.9 million in additional venture capital to complete development of production level tools for the CMOS and hard disk-drive industries.

CEO Mark Melliar-Smith says the 7-year-old company has a strong roster of industry backers and venture capitalists steeped in nanotechnology production markets and was not looking to add strategic help in the round. Molecular Imprints brought on the Kuwaiti-backed fund Wafra Investment Advisory Group of New York as a new investor to join Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Tokyo Electron Venture Capital, KT Venture Group, Alloy Ventures and Motorola Ventures.

This latest investment brings the total amount raised by Molecular Imprints for the development and commercialization of its technology to $73 million. Along with its equity backing, the company has been supported by $15 million over the years from federal government agencies, including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and $3 million from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund.

Molecular Imprints is built around proprietary technology developed at the University of Texas for "Step and Flash Imprint Lithography" that allows semiconductor manufacturers to emboss minute circuit patterns on a substrate. The technology is used in semiconductor manufacturing and other applications, including LEDs for solid-state lighting and magnetic-data storage for micro disk drives. The company has demonstrated sub-20 nanometer resolution at ambient temperatures and pressure, while traditional methods for creating such small patterns require either extremely high temperatures or high pressures, vastly increasing the cost of producing chips.
 
Molecular Imprints' inroads with major disk-drive manufacturing companies including Motorola Inc. [MOT] Hewlettt-Packard Co. [HPQ] and Hitachi Ltd. [ADR: HIT] has won it industry respect. A recent showing at an annual semiconductor trade show won additional plaudits.

Melliar-Smith says the company is well-known in the arenas it operates in and has little need for broad marketing efforts. Molecular Imprints will use the bulk of the new money to adapt its development level lithography tools to production markets. The company had 2007 sales of $13 million and expects $25 million this year, but Melliar-Smith says the new funding will gear the company up for much larger production markets in the disk-drive industry in 2010 and the CMOS chip market in 2013. -- Clifford Carlsen

See May 19 press release from Molecular Imprints
See March 3 post on nanoimprint tech from Semiconductor International blog

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