Breaking barriers: The hype

While I was car­ry­ing out my research stud­ies, I had a rever­ie, a dream to take my research find­ings on nano­ma­te­ri­als beyond sci­en­tif­ic arti­cles for greater tech­no­log­i­cal, indus­tri­al and soci­etal ben­e­fits. I was for­tu­nate enough to pur­sue in the path of bring­ing my dream into real­i­ty. After over a decade of jour­ney in the process of bring­ing the research inno­va­tion clos­er to the semi­con­duc­tor indus­try, the light at the end of the tun­nel is becom­ing vis­i­ble and widen­ing day by day. Hence as a nan­otech entre­pre­neur I thought of shar­ing my holis­tic view of tech­nol­o­gy and soci­ety, per­spec­tives and process­es of chas­ing my dreams com­ing true.

Why I do what I do

Back in 2005, the final days of my PhD stud­ies, a moment of com­bined feel­ings of shiv­er­ing excite­ment and ner­vous­ness. These are the days when one expe­ri­ence intense con­glom­er­a­tions of thrust of writ­ing up the­sis chap­ters, fin­ish­ing cours­es, sub­mit­ting var­i­ous man­u­scripts for sci­en­tif­ic arti­cles, thoughts bounc­ing back & forth on walk­ing towards an unknown future, etc. Appar­ent­ly, such com­plex­i­ty of the sit­u­a­tion was not enough for my adren­a­line rush, I end­ed up start­ing a com­pa­ny named Smoltek. A baby step to pur­sue my dream with­out know­ing the uncer­tain­ty, hur­dles and roller coast­er expe­ri­ence that may come with it. And of course, to spice up the sit­u­a­tion, why not start the com­pa­ny at the time when the ‘hype’ of ‘car­bon nan­otech­nol­o­gy’ is at its pick!

The hype

When it comes for tech­nol­o­gy hype, Gart­ner has a very good way of pre­sent­ing high lev­el inno­va­tion trend and how a tech­nol­o­gy may mature over time to enter into the mar­ket place and may phase out even­tu­al­ly as shown in the Hype Cycle below.

As can be seen, in the year 2005 the posi­tion of Car­bon nan­otube is described as a hype mate­r­i­al to be used in the indus­try. Over the peri­od of past decade, tremen­dous attrac­tion on car­bon nanos­truc­tures both in the acad­e­mia and in the indus­try lead to 10000+ patents and 10000+ sci­en­tif­ic arti­cles BUT essen­tial­ly no sig­nif­i­cant high vol­ume indus­tri­al adop­tion! Hence, evi­dent­ly jus­ti­fy­ing a ‘hype’ syndrome.

There­fore one may won­der why car­bon nanos­truc­tures have attract­ed such an enor­mous atten­tion and why still a big push to make it hap­pen­ing into the industry.

Car­bon nano­ma­te­ri­als may come in ver­sa­tile forms and for­mats with many dif­fer­ent properties. 

In brief, this is what made the mate­ri­als so attrac­tive. Over the decades, researchers around the world have demon­strat­ed many use­ful­ness and appli­ca­tions of the mate­ri­als through sci­en­tif­ic arti­cles and inven­tion dis­clo­sures. A few fun­da­men­tal prop­er­ties that have drawn the main atten­tion are nano­size, extreme light weight, stronger than Kevlar, bet­ter thermal/​electrical con­duc­tor than cop­per, hydrophilic/​hydrophobic, high aspect ratio struc­tures, bot­tom up chem­istry con­trolled growth of nanos­truc­tures etc … and the list of inter­est­ing prop­er­ties may sim­ply continue.

The next obvi­ous ques­tion may be why there is no major adop­tion to the semi­con­duc­tor indus­try of such won­der mate­r­i­al? Well, there can be very many opin­ions but one obvi­ous rea­son was the absence of a break­through tech­nol­o­gy that could enable the pos­si­bil­i­ty of inte­grat­ing such won­der mate­ri­als into main­frame semi­con­duc­tor indus­try (the indus­try that has enabled our dig­i­tal world as of today!).

The good news is: The sce­nario is chang­ing fast!

Very lim­it­ed adap­ta­tion of car­bon nano­ma­te­ri­als in indus­tri­al appli­ca­tions have been wit­nessed over the past decades e.g. as bulk mate­ri­als for R&D, in com­pos­ites, sur­face coat­ings, etc. How­ev­er, for the semi­con­duc­tor indus­try, the pen­e­tra­tion has not been rec­og­nized until today. Nan­tero per­haps the fore­run­ner in break­ing the bar­ri­er to enter into the semi­con­duc­tor indus­try through a recent­ly announced licenc­ing deal for man­u­fac­tur­ing NRAM mem­o­ry chips. 

Smoltek, is aggres­sive­ly work­ing on bring­ing its pro­pri­etary pack­ag­ing plat­form suit­able for the upcom­ing 2.5D and 3D het­ero­ge­neous inte­gra­tion SiP/​SoC pack­ag­ing with the abil­i­ty to shrink the 3D pack­ag­ing dimen­sion with addi­tion­al func­tion­al­i­ty such as embed­ded capacitor/​energy stor­ing devices. 

Such an indus­tri­al mar­riage between tra­di­tion­al tech­nol­o­gy, nan­otech­nol­o­gy & nano­ma­te­ri­als and cohab­i­ta­tions is as usu­al not with­out a fight. There has been a lot of if’s & but’s over the decades, a lot of intel­lec­tu­al, sci­en­tif­ic and prac­ti­cal­i­ty dis­cus­sions, a lot of bar­ri­ers to over­come but still appar­ent­ly set­tling at the end.

The nan­otech entre­pre­neurs are per­sis­tent­ly inno­vat­ing to break the bar­ri­ers one after anoth­er and per­haps a lot more to break BUT cre­at­ing the path to impact!

Next article

In the next arti­cle of this series, I will make an attempt to dive into ‘the real­i­ty’ with respect to my view as a nan­otech entre­pre­neur and how the real­i­ty is aid­ing pos­i­tive­ly for nan­otech star­tups in break­ing the bar­ri­ers to get into the real world.