Breaking barriers: The future

My 8 year old daugh­ter just learned how to text in an Ipad! And that was it, she become obsessed in writ­ing small, small text and express­ing emo­tions using emo­jis! Only with­in two days, when we have argu­ments and things do not go in her way, instead of cry­ing (as it used to be) she learned how to express her emo­tions through mes­saging! This is per­haps the future of digit­al gen­er­a­tion with an accel­er­ated adop­tion of high tech gad­gets, chan­ging our ges­tures & means of digit­al emo­tion­al expres­sions and the demands on func­tion­al­ity simply will break through the roof. This is how­ever maybe a bit scary as a par­ent but one can­not stop the future to be hap­pen­ing rather per­haps can take appro­pri­ate meas­ure instead. Part of being a techy par­ent, we can guess where the future maybe going. Moreover, as a techy entre­pren­eur, we know that so many things that are tech­nic­ally with­in our reach com­bin­ing nan­o­tech­no­logy and nanomaterials!

The future

Speak­ing of the future, let’s start from what we have just wit­nessed in the year 2018! A nice infograph­ic by (@lorillewis & @officiallyChadd above) sum­mar­izes our 60 seconds on this digit­al earth! Smart­phones has already made all the but­tons as a thing of the past.

Bio­met­ric pass­words becom­ing the norm, drone based driver­less deliv­ery have star­ted, the rise of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) is wit­nessed. And my per­son­al favor­ite is everything becom­ing wire­less includ­ing head­phones, char­ging sta­tions etc.

How­ever, Nan­o­tech­no­logy has already been imple­men­ted in the semi­con­duct­or pro­duc­tion for dec­ades to con­tin­ue with advanced scal­ing the hard­ware plat­form e.g. through dif­fer­ent tech­no­logy nodes. What is moreover new to the industry is to integ­rate nan­o­ma­ter­i­als to enhance, empower and revamp the future of hard­ware platforms. 

Con­nect­ing back to Break­ing Bar­ri­ers Part II, the semi­con­duct­or industry has reached to a point of tech­no­logy scal­ing where innov­a­tion and innov­at­ive mater­i­als are in demand to move for­ward with future scal­ing, per­form­ance enhance­ments, eco­nom­ics of scale and func­tion­al­ity enrich­ment. Through the infograph­ics sum­mar­iz­ing our 60 seconds also show­ing that we are wit­ness­ing a trans­ition from hard­ware driv­en soft­ware plat­form to soft­ware driv­en hard­ware specifications. 

Some cool stuffs in and around the corner: 

An example of devel­op­ment of nan­o­ma­ter­i­als to con­sumer products is por­trayed in the infograph­ic below. Some example nan­o­ma­ter­i­als com­pany are shown break­ing bar­ri­ers to enter into the mar­kets to give some fla­vor to our dis­cus­sions about products around the corner.

Per­haps you already have a smart­phone which is water repel­lent. Then you maybe already reap­ing the bene­fits of a product made out of nan­o­ma­ter­i­als! P2i is a nan­o­ma­ter­i­al com­pany that has figured out a way to con­vert molecules into water repel­lent nan­o­ma­ter­i­als coat­ing! They already have shipped 250+ Mil­lions of devices includ­ing smart­phones, head­phones, Bluetooth head­sets and hear­ing aids pro­tec­ted through their nan­o­ma­ter­i­al technology. 

Now, what could be the nat­ur­al evol­u­tion of smart­phone or gad­gets in the com­ing years? Could it be flex­ible smart­phone design that may win the consumer’s interest, or per­haps gad­gets with even bend­able or stretch­able dis­plays? Well then, C3NANO and Canatu are doing the right thing to bring such fantasy into reality; 

C3NANO essen­tially glue or fuse sil­ver nanowires at nano­scale mak­ing the mater­i­als enhan­cing both the trans­par­ency and the touch sens­it­iv­ity performances.

Canatu bring­ing their pro­pri­et­ary Car­bon Nan­oBud® mater­i­al, which enable design free­dom for touch inter­faces with the abil­ity to stretch the screen to more than 200%. Such car­bon nan­o­ma­ter­i­als can be bent and flexed in tight­er radii than 1 mm! Thanks to the involved car­bon atoms which does not reflect any light, enables touch dis­plays with deep black and high con­trast. Maybe one day soon they will enable com­pletely trans­par­ent mon­it­ors which were seen in sci-fi movies like in The Avengers a reality. 

Then why to miss out the oppor­tun­ity to enjoy the extremely detailed per­fectly colored res­ol­u­tion in vir­tu­al real­ity (VR) exper­i­ence? Hope­fully we won’t, since Glo is bring­ing their het­ero­gen­eous nan­o­ma­ter­i­als tech­no­logy to enable just that! 

Trans­par­ent bend­able dis­play, and VR exper­i­ence may be cool, but how often do we charge our smart­phone? Would it be even more cool if we could charge our smart­phone in less than 60 seconds? Store­dot aims to empower exactly that. They are exploit­ing nan­o­ma­ter­i­als in the form of particles includ­ing sil­ic­on, car­bon and some more ele­ments to enable the quick charging. 

Still, It’s the inside that counts

So far we have been talk­ing about the out­side of a smart­phone. How about the inside of a smart­phone, which essen­tially enables us to do so much of magic with our fin­ger­tips? No wor­ries, we have that covered as well. Let’s high­light two essen­tials parts, or the brain if you will, of a smart gad­get like smart­phone: (a) the App pro­cessor and (b) the memory. The more arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI), aug­men­ted real­ity (AR) and vir­tu­al real­ity (VR) we would like to exper­i­ence, the bet­ter these two guys need to be in the form of com­pu­ta­tion­al power, memory band­width and power efficiency.

Nantero is bring­ing car­bon nan­otubes to build high-dens­ity non-volat­ile memory called NRAM® that is incred­ibly fast, can deliv­er the poten­tial for ter­abits of stor­age in a single chip while con­sum­ing very little power. If you sud­denly got 10x faster memory in your next gad­get, don’t get sur­prised, it may be from them. 

Now what about the App pro­cessor? The App micro­pro­cessor does the really hard job (the com­pu­ta­tion­al work) to enable an app to run a func­tion through our fin­ger­tips. Moreover, the rise of AI, and great­er demands for AR, VR and many oth­er func­tion­al­it­ies, the App micro­pro­cessor needs to work ter­ribly hard to coup up with the com­pu­ta­tion­al power demand. To get into a slightly deep­er inside of the app pro­cessor, such spiky power demands are stag­ger­ingly high that stresses the cor­res­pond­ing cir­cuit power man­age­ment to mal­func­tion. Such event can lead to slow pace in the app to func­tion or worse case hic­cups or even shut­down of the processor! 

Smol­tek tech­no­logy will ful­fill such high paced demand for power bank at a very small foot­print. It’s CNF-MIM tech­no­logy exploits car­bon nan­ofibers mater­i­als to build such power bank in the form of high value capa­cit­ors which can be placed dir­ectly inside and around an App pro­cessor to tackle such power surge so that the mam­moth orches­tra of com­pu­ta­tion­al work can run smoothly without a hiccup. 

The beauty of Smoltek’s CNF-MIM capa­cit­ors is enabling a 3D sur­face area in a 2D foot­print! Smol­tek how­ever is not sat­is­fied with just that, but also want to bring the bene­fits of car­bon nan­o­ma­ter­i­als even for 2.5D and 3D advanced pack­aging and het­ero­gen­eous integ­ra­tion solu­tions, so that more com­plex, embed­ded and power hungry sys­tems can be assembled togeth­er at a smal­ler, slick­er footprint. 

To sum up, some tech­no­logy is tak­ing longer than oth­er but the pic­ture is con­ver­ging to bring products to mar­ket. Every­one have their own way of exploit­ing the prop­er­ties of nan­o­ma­ter­i­als for good. The dif­fer­ence is made in the innov­at­ive approaches and it is all about pay­ing atten­tion to the details. For nan­o­ma­ter­i­als case such atten­tion has happened to be down to the nano level or even per­haps atom­ic level. Under­stand­ing of dif­fer­ent mech­an­isms behind what mat­ters and what not at that level cre­ates the oppor­tun­ity for innov­a­tions to improve the functions/​properties of a device.

The defin­it­ive areas where the nan­o­ma­ter­i­als impact­ing are: smal­ler, faster, per­form­ance enhance­ment, embed­ded func­tion­al­ity, light-weight, eco-friendly and of course more for the buck.

Breaking the barriers

Smol­tek, the com­pany once I have star­ted and lived through and wit­ness­ing how bar­ri­ers are broken in many dif­fer­ent per­spect­ives. The jour­ney star­ted with a tiny little idea of a product on mak­ing a sensor based on grown car­bon nan­o­ma­ter­i­als. The ini­tial idea didn’t fly in the industry obvi­ously due to a tech­nic­al issue or even a bot­tle­neck: the tem­per­at­ure to grow these nan­o­ma­ter­i­als is so high that it would kill oth­er devices. 

We took a pivot at that point to focus and solve that par­tic­u­lar tem­per­at­ure prob­lem. Through many years of R&D, the team have figured out a few engin­eer­ing nobs that can be played with to tune pro­cesses to enable grow­ing car­bon nano­struc­tures on a giv­en sur­face. The sur­face can be any­thing, includ­ing alu­mini­um foil from our kit­chen! Smoltek’s main break­through came when we found the sweet spot to grow car­bon nan­ofibers at a tem­per­at­ure below 390 °C.

Break­through in grow­ing the car­bon nan­o­ma­ter­i­als at below 390°C, an industry com­pat­ible tem­per­at­ure, also have broken the hard­est tech­nic­al barrier.

This is the bor­der line for CMOS industry, the industry that makes up the digit­al world as of today. From this point on indus­tri­al applic­a­tion can take off.

At this stage we were only wel­comed by the industry but yet to be wanted. Now we had to proof what our nan­o­ma­ter­i­al growth tech­no­logy could be good for. Anoth­er bar­ri­er popped up: Find­ing a pain point for industry where our mater­i­als fit to release the pain becomes the next bar­ri­er to break. And we found one, the capacitor!

The unbeat­able form factor and 10–100× smal­ler foot­print com­pared to exist­ing tech­no­logy opens up the door to dis­rupt (replace) exist­ing tech­no­logy in many tech­no­logy ver­tic­als. What Smol­tek is build­ing in terms of capa­cit­or, in gen­er­ic terms can be con­sidered as an energy stor­age bank. We can store tre­mend­ous amount of charge with­in a very small foot­print. Free­ing out import­ant and expens­ive real-estate area on a sil­ic­on chip or a PCB. Today, com­pany is gear­ing up its activ­it­ies togeth­er with indus­tri­al play­ers to bring the tech­no­logy into product(s).

The capa­cit­or is one of the fun­da­ment­al build­ing blocks for any giv­en cir­cuit. It is used for many reas­ons. One of the most essen­tial use of them is to be used for man­aging power glitches that may occur dur­ing the switch­ing events of bil­lions of tran­sist­ors. Such a gigant­ic orches­tra is typ­ic­ally har­mon­ized through using capa­cit­ors at dif­fer­ent levels of cir­cuits so the music can be played out without a hitch.

The high value capa­cit­ors can then find its way inside high per­form­ing micro­pro­cessors for AR, VR, AI, smart­phones, cloud com­put­ing, tab­lets, laptops, wear­ables, het­ero­gen­eous integ­ra­tion and even­tu­ally any oth­er inter­net of things (IoT) inspired elec­tron­ic devices or gadgets.

The reas­on behind why Smoltek’s capa­cit­or device is so cool is due to the ver­sat­il­ity of its form factor! Depend­ing on the demand of an applic­a­tion, the form factors can be changed to boos­ted up the energy stor­age capa­city. For inter­net of things, power man­age­ment will be essen­tial at a very small footprint.

Intro­duc­tion of AI into the Smart­phone have star­ted and demand will con­tin­ue to enable per­form­ing loc­al AI tasks without being in con­nect­ing with the cloud. VR and AR will also hit the road to cre­ate tre­mend­ous load on the power man­age­ment of indi­vidu­al pro­cessors. To make them func­tion­ing without a power glitch, the capa­cit­or banks will act as the savior of the day.

The inevitability and some reflections

The poten­tial of Nan­o­ma­ter­i­als tech­no­logy enables such deeply rooted tech­no­logy that every sec­tor of the hard­ware plat­form is bound to be benefited when exploited appro­pri­ately. ‘Less is more’ per­haps a per­fect way of sum­mar­iz­ing about the nan­o­ma­ter­i­als. We have reached to an inflec­tion point in tech­no­lo­gic­al pro­gress where my take is, nan­o­ma­ter­i­als are no longer a choice, neither about dis­rup­tions, rather it is about inev­it­ab­il­ity to drive the future. The exist­ing hard­ware plat­form and soft­ware have brought the world with­in our thumb. I won­der what our thumb will be empowered to do when the fusion of nan­o­ma­ter­i­als and nan­o­tech­no­logy is real­ized. Some­thing worth watch­ing for.

Whatever dir­ec­tion the future gad­gets will take, we have it all covered through nan­o­ma­ter­i­als and nan­o­tech­no­logy. After over a dec­ade of wit­ness­ing the shift from being only hype to real­ity, cre­at­ing paths which did not exist, it is indeed a very strange mix of inex­press­ibly touchy feel­ings to observe that things are sud­denly align­ing in order. Indus­tri­al interest increas­ing from day to day to come up integ­ra­tion pos­sib­il­it­ies not only towards our own envi­sioned applic­a­tion but also for the customer’s own iden­ti­fied applications.

Such an entre­pren­eur­i­al jour­ney would have not been pos­sible without the sys­tem that sup­ports it and the people sup­port­ing such endeavors to stay in the course of devel­op­ment. The team, and the investors all have shown tre­mend­ous entre­pren­eur­i­al stam­ina to come to this far. It is once again show­ing the case that the entre­pren­eurs do not take ‘no’ for an answer. And the word ‘fail­ure’ do not exists in their dictionary.

I how­ever have real­ized that I am only get­ting warmed up and ready to shift my gear to bring the future to the real­ity through accel­er­ated innov­a­tions and indus­tri­al­iz­a­tion. We surely have more bar­ri­ers to break. Such bar­ri­ers how­ever do not con­cern me since it is in our nature to break­ing barriers!

The jour­ney in bring­ing the nan­o­ma­ter­i­als to the soci­ety evid­ently cre­at­ing more oppor­tun­it­ies for investors, cre­ate more jobs for highly tal­en­ted people and not but least more super smart gad­gets to enjoy the life for ourselves and for the gen­er­a­tion to come. Visu­al­iz­ing such scen­ario, I am feel­ing a hid­den pleas­ure of my vis­ion of turn­ing a simple idea into soci­et­al val­ues to be a real­ity. Such feel­ings make me to wake up every morn­ing and go to work and drives me to do what I do.