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.