Smoltek—from carbon nanofibers to mind-controlled robotic prostheses

Finn Gram­naes was in the oper­at­ing room when his daugh­ter was delivered by planned cesarean sec­tion. But instead of hear­ing the new­born announce its arrival into the world with a scream, he heard noth­ing. “There was a strange silence in the room,” Finn Gram­naes remem­bers. “It made me ter­ri­fied, and I froze.”

After what seemed like an etern­ity, the girl began to scream. But still, some­thing wasn’t right. “I felt there was some­thing in the room that…,” says Finn Gram­naes without fin­ish­ing the sentence.

Even­tu­ally, he got to see his long-awaited baby girl. He was filled with relief and love at the sight of her. She was won­der­ful. But he also real­ized that life had taken an unex­pec­ted turn. She had a severely deformed right leg. The knee joint was miss­ing as well as the tibia, and the foot was twisted.

Life-changing decision

After more than six years of well-meant but unsuc­cess­ful attempts to recon­struct the knee joint and tibia, the girl’s par­ents faced a life-chan­ging decision. Sac­ri­fice their daughter’s child­hood for more lengthy and pain­ful attempts at recon­struc­tion. Or per­suade her to cut off the leg above the non-exist­ent knee joint.

After much delib­er­a­tion, they per­suaded the girl to ampu­tate. “But it did not go as expec­ted,” says her fath­er. When he con­vinced his daugh­ter to ampu­tate, he didn’t know there were no knee joint pros­theses for chil­dren. “Instead, they hand­made some­thing, with basic­ally a hinge,” he explains.

Took matters into his own hands

The girl stumbled and fell fre­quently and often came home with abra­sions all over her body. “She was scared and insec­ure. It was men­tally bad for her,” says her fath­er. He exper­i­enced ter­rible remorse for “trick­ing” his daugh­ter into some­thing that didn’t work out. “We can fly to the moon, but we can’t make knee replace­ments for chil­dren,” he says.

Finn Gram­naes took mat­ters into his own hands. In the even­ings, until late at night, and every week­end, he stud­ied ana­tomy and exper­i­mented with designs that mim­ic a knee joint’s move­ments and force dis­tri­bu­tion. His efforts paid off, and he could give his daugh­ter bet­ter and bet­ter prostheses.

Arti­fi­cial knee joint

Finn Gram­naes con­tin­ued to devel­op his pros­thes­is. In April 1990, he applied for pat­ents for his “arti­fi­cial knee joint” and an “arti­fi­cial foot.”

For more people to bene­fit from his pros­theses, he looked for busi­ness part­ners with good access to cap­it­al and a large mar­ket. He found them in the United States. Togeth­er they foun­ded Cen­tury XXII Innov­a­tions Inc. in Michigan, where many advanced con­tract man­u­fac­tur­ers serve the avi­ation industry. Finn Gram­naes became respons­ible for the devel­op­ment and indus­tri­al­iz­a­tion of his knee and foot prostheses.

To Sweden from Bangladesh

Mean­while, in Bangladesh, Mohammad Shafiqul Kabir was study­ing sci­ence. Shafiqul—called Shafiq by friends—nurtured a desire to study abroad.

When his stud­ies at the uni­ver­sity were com­ing to an end, he tried to fig­ure out  what to do next. He con­tac­ted the Swedish Embassy to find out which master’s pro­grams might be of interest. “Swedish uni­ver­sit­ies must have good pro­grams, and after­all, the Nobel prize was estab­lished in Sweden,” Shafiq Kabir remembers.

A master’s pro­gram at the Chalmers Uni­ver­sity of Tech­no­logy in Gothen­burg caught his interest. It focused on nan­o­tech­no­logy. “I remem­ber think­ing: ‘There it is! I’ll give it a shot’,” says Shafiq Kabir and explains: “Nan­o­tech­no­logy was new and very hyped at the time.”

Shafiq Kabir arrived in Sweden on a sunny day in August 1998. Two years later, in 2000, he gradu­ated with a Mas­ter of Sci­ence degree.

Shortly after that, Shafiq Kabir was offered doc­tor­al stu­dent employ­ment at the Depart­ment of Micro­tech­no­logy and Nanos­cience at the Chalmers Uni­ver­sity of Tech­no­logy. He was delighted. Since child­hood, he had dreamed of doing research.

Shafiq Kabir began this new chapter in his life in the area of molecu­lar elec­tron­ics but even­tu­ally moved to research on car­bon nano­struc­tures. In par­tic­u­lar, he stud­ied how car­bon nano­struc­tures can be made com­pat­ible with the man­u­fac­tur­ing pro­cess of semi­con­duct­ors. His super­visor, Pro­fess­or Peter Enoks­son, was pion­eer­ing and lead­ing in that area.

Nanostructures on semiconductors

Shafiq Kabir’s research at the Chalmers Uni­ver­sity of Tech­no­logy was about using car­bon atoms to cre­ate small struc­tures dir­ectly on CMOS semi­con­duct­ors. He had to tackle many challenges.

One chal­lenge is that the struc­tures we are talk­ing about are extremely small. They are meas­ured in nano­metres (nm). That’s why they are called nano­struc­tures. It is dif­fi­cult to under­stand how small they are. But ima­gine tak­ing one of your hairs and split­ting it length­wise, and then divid­ing each half again and so on until you have about 50,000 strips of your single hair strand. Each such strip is now about one nano­metre in dia­met­er. How can struc­tures that are so incred­ibly small be built with pre­ci­sion? That was one of the ques­tions Shafiq Kabir searched for an answer to.

Anoth­er chal­lenge is that CMOS semi­con­duct­ors break down at the tem­per­at­ures needed to fab­ric­ate nano­struc­tures. To make it pos­sible to fab­ric­ate nano­struc­tures dir­ectly on CMOS semi­con­duct­ors, the fab­ric­a­tion tem­per­at­ure must be lowered by sev­er­al hun­dred degrees. But how? That was anoth­er of Shafiq Kabir’s research questions.

Versatile carbon nanostructures

One form of a nano­struc­ture, in par­tic­u­lar, attrac­ted the interest of Shafiq Kabir: car­bon nan­ofibers (CNFs). They have many unique mater­i­al prop­er­ties that are inter­est­ing in all sorts of contexts.

Car­bon nan­ofibers are sur­pris­ingly dur­able and can be used as a sup­port or rein­force­ment bar (“rebar”) for mater­i­als that become brittle at small sizes. They can also be used as mini­ature spacers between lay­ers of mater­i­als. Or as needles that make micro­scop­ic holes in membranes.

Car­bon nan­ofibers are very good at con­duct­ing heat—but only in one dir­ec­tion. That prop­erty can be used to solve one of the biggest prob­lems as more and more tran­sist­ors are squeezed onto a chip: Heat dis­sip­a­tion. A chip can become madly hot, short­en­ing its lifespan and increas­ing the risk of fail­ure. But car­bon nan­ofibers from the chip to the cap­sule that encloses the chip can effect­ively dis­sip­ate the heat.

And it’s not just heat that car­bon nan­ofibers con­duct effi­ciently, but also elec­tri­city. That’s why they can be used as con­tacts and con­duct­ors on chips instead of sol­der­ing cop­per con­tacts and con­duct­ors. The good con­duct­iv­ity, com­bined with their small size, also opens up the pos­sib­il­ity of con­nect­ing bio­sensors dir­ectly to indi­vidu­al nerve cells.

Large surface area with small fiber

But above all, car­bon nan­ofibers arranged in rows and columns can be used to mul­tiply a sur­face area. Each car­bon nan­ofibre increases the sur­face area by ? times its dia­met­er times its height. So a “forest” of car­bon nan­ofibers will grow the sur­face area thou­sands of times.

Ima­gine a square sur­face with a width and height of one mil­li­meter. It can eas­ily hold 100,000 rows and as many columns of car­bon nan­ofibers that are 5 nano­metres in dia­met­er and 50 micro­met­ers in length. The sur­face area of those car­bon nan­ofibers increases the total sur­face area 7 855 times. In oth­er words, with car­bon nan­ofibers, you can eas­ily shrink an area of 88 × 88 mil­li­meters to just 1 × 1 millimeters.

This abil­ity to increase the sur­face area many thou­sand­folds is bene­fi­cial in vari­ous applic­a­tions. For example, with car­bon nan­ofibers coated with titani­um on the sur­face of a titani­um implant, the implant’s sur­face area increases, mak­ing it easi­er to grow togeth­er with bone. Anoth­er example is the mini­atur­iz­a­tion of capacitors.

Car­bon nan­ofibre capacitors

A capa­cit­or is an elec­tron­ic com­pon­ent that tem­por­ar­ily stores energy in the form of an elec­tric field between two sep­ar­ated con­duct­ive sur­faces. A “forest” of car­bon nan­ofibers provides a lot of sur­face areas between which energy can be stored in a tiny space. There­fore, capa­cit­ors with car­bon nan­ofibers can be made much smal­ler without degrad­ing their abil­ity to store energy (capa­cit­ance).

This is espe­cially use­ful in chip applic­a­tions, where capa­cit­ors are needed very close to—or prefer­ably on—the chip to dampen the noise that res­ults when thou­sands of tran­sist­ors rap­idly turn the power on and off to make ones and zer­os. The dampen­ing effect comes from the fact that it takes a little while to charge and dis­charge a capacitor.

The birth of Smoltek

How­ever, all these excit­ing applic­a­tions of car­bon nan­ofibers require the abil­ity to man­u­fac­ture them to a spe­cif­ic dia­met­er and length, place them with extreme pre­ci­sion, and do so at a tem­per­at­ure that does not dam­age the sub­strate. How to achieve this was the focus of Shafiq Kabir’s research.

His research efforts bore fruit, and in 2005, while fin­ish­ing his Ph.D. thes­is, he star­ted Smol­tek to devel­op the meth­ods fur­ther to make them avail­able to the industry. He was accom­pan­ied by his Ph.D. advisor, Pro­fess­or Peter Enoksson.

Professor meets his adept

When Peter Enoks­son was offered a chair at the Depart­ment of Micro­tech­no­logy and Nanos­cience at the Chalmers Uni­ver­sity of Tech­no­logy, he gladly accep­ted the pro­fess­or­ship. He star­ted in Octo­ber 2001.

He came to work closely with Stefan Bengts­son (now Pres­id­ent and CEO of the Chalmers Uni­ver­sity of Tech­no­logy) and Elean­or Camp­bell (who cur­rently holds a Chair of Chem­istry at the Uni­ver­sity of Edin­burgh). Their com­mon area of interest was car­bon nano­struc­tures. One of the Ph.D. stu­dents who also worked on this was Shafiq Kabir.

“Shafiq was very much into apply­ing ‘help lay­ers’ to con­trol where car­bon nano­struc­tures grow and to make them faster and more con­trolled,” Peter Enoks­son remem­bers. Peter Enoks­son became Shafiq Kabir’s supervisor.

“We saw many applic­a­tions of tech­no­logy and thought it would take over everything,” recalls Peter Enoks­son. They called it “the new electronics.”

But they also real­ized that it had to be made com­pat­ible with CMOS—the pre­dom­in­ant man­u­fac­tur­ing meth­od for semi­con­duct­or devices. It had to be pos­sible to man­u­fac­ture the car­bon nano­struc­tures at tem­per­at­ures that CMOS can withstand—which is much lower than needed to cre­ate car­bon nano­struc­tures. So this became the focus of their fur­ther research.

Huge in few years

When Shafiq Kabir later foun­ded Smol­tek, Peter Enoks­son, Stefan Bengts­son, and Elean­or Camp­bell became the company’s sci­entif­ic advisors. And when Smol­tek raised seed cap­it­al from Chalmers Innov­a­tion (now Chalmers Ven­ture), a busi­ness incub­at­or asso­ci­ated with the Chalmers Uni­ver­sity of Tech­no­logy, Peter Enoks­son was involved in invest­ing in the company.

“Shafiq and I thought Smol­tek would be huge in just a few years,” says Peter Enoks­son with a laugh. Because it turned out not to be as easy as they thought. Des­pite unpre­ced­en­ted res­ults and excel­lent prop­er­ties, it was dif­fi­cult to con­vince the elec­tron­ics industry.

After a few years, it was high time to bring industry exper­i­ence to the board of dir­ect­ors. The ques­tion went to Finn Gramnaes—the fath­er who built a knee pros­thes­is to help his daugh­ter and then took it to the world market.

Time for industrial experience

In the same year as Shafiq Kabir began his doc­tor­al stud­ies, the com­pany that Finn Gram­naes co-foun­ded in the US was sold to the Iceland­ic pros­thet­ics man­u­fac­turer Össur. Finn Gramnae’s com­pany had received many takeover offers. Even­tu­ally, the bids were so high that some of Finn’s seni­or part­ners decided it was time to sell.

Finn was now without a job but with a good deal of money in his pock­et. He spent a lot of time in Spain, played golf, went to cock­tail parties, and tried to live the life expec­ted of someone who had made an exit and was fin­an­cially inde­pend­ent. But some­thing was miss­ing in his life.

Searching for meaning in life

Finn Gram­naes wanted some­thing tan­gible to do—something that helped oth­ers and gave him mean­ing in life. So he star­ted to help oth­er innov­at­ors and entre­pren­eurs devel­op their businesses.

Finn Gram­naes had some good con­tacts in the fin­an­cial world. They offered their con­tacts in the hope of shar­ing risk with someone with money. In this way, Finn came to sit on the boards of a wide range of businesses.

“I was look­ing for a com­pany that really could con­trib­ute to human­ity,” Finn Gram­naes says. But years passed without him find­ing the “right” com­pany. He did, how­ever, learn some hard lessons.

But one day, he found on his desk a doc­u­ment that would change everything.

It clicked

“One day, someone gave me a text by Smol­tek,” Finn Gram­naes says. “It ‘clicked’ when I read it, and I thought, ‘Wow! There it is.’”

Smol­tek had a pending pat­ent that covered many applic­a­tion areas. There were many thoughts and vis­ions about what was pos­sible to do with it. “I saw the pos­sib­il­it­ies and was extremely fas­cin­ated,” says Finn Gram­naes. “Smoltek’s tech­no­logy has the poten­tial to solve many of the prob­lems I encountered dur­ing my jour­ney devel­op­ing pros­theses.” He adds: “If I hadn’t made that jour­ney, which made me real­ize that there is a lack of advanced tech­no­logy in sev­er­al areas, I prob­ably wouldn’t have fallen for Smoltek.”

So when Chalmers Innov­a­tion asked him if he would con­sider join­ing Smoltek’s board, he accep­ted without hes­it­a­tion. Even­tu­ally, he and Peter Enoks­son bought out Chalmers Innov­a­tion and became the company’s largest shareholders.

Business concept

Smoltek’s busi­ness concept is to license the tech­no­logy in vari­ous degrees of refine­ment. From the most basic level, that can be used in indus­tri­al research pro­jects, to fin­ished applic­a­tions, such as car­bon nan­ofibre capacitors.

The busi­ness mod­el is to seek part­ner­ships with com­pan­ies and organ­iz­a­tions that want to eval­u­ate or use Smoltek’s technology.

The focus now and in the future will be on cre­at­ing more and deep­er rela­tion­ships with part­ners. And not least broaden the search for partners.

Working with a conservative industry

Until recently, Smol­tek has only focused on the semi­con­duct­or industry, but since the form­a­tion in autumn 2020 of the sub­si­di­ary Smol­tek Innov­a­tion, the search for part­ners in new sec­tors has gathered pace—not least in green energy and green industry.

There are two reas­ons for Smoltek’s broad­en­ing. First, Smoltek’s core tech­no­logy, for which it holds a world pat­ent, is com­pre­hens­ive and can be used in many and diverse indus­tries far bey­ond the semi­con­duct­or industry.

The second reas­on is that the semi­con­duct­or industry is very con­ser­vat­ive and cau­tious. It is not sur­pris­ing. Com­pan­ies in the industry are mak­ing huge invest­ments, coun­ted in bil­lions of dol­lars, which increase dra­mat­ic­ally with each new gen­er­a­tion of CPUs and oth­er semi­con­duct­or com­pon­ents. There­fore, com­pan­ies are extremely cau­tious about what tech­no­logy they bring in. It has to be estab­lished and already proved itself in the real world.

The last reas­on is also why Smol­tek has chosen to focus on car­bon nan­ofibre capa­cit­ors. It gives Smol­tek a chance to show what the tech­no­logy is cap­able of, in a way vis­ible to the semi­con­duct­or industry, but with no risk for them.

Battle-testing the technology

Many chips have attached capa­cit­ors that com­pete with con­nect­ors for space. If the capa­cit­ors can be made smal­ler, the chip can be made smal­ler or have more connectors.

Smoltek’s strategy is to help the world’s largest capa­cit­or man­u­fac­tur­ers use car­bon nan­ofibers to pro­duce capa­cit­ors that take up less sur­face area and, more import­antly, less height than the mini­atur­ized capa­cit­ors avail­able today.

In this way, Smoltek’s tech­no­logy is battle-tested in a way that is “harm­less” to the semi­con­duct­or industry but vis­ible to them. In par­al­lel, Smol­tek talks with all major com­pan­ies in the semi­con­duct­or industry to con­vince them to dare the leap.

Next step

Once the car­bon nan­ofibre capa­cit­ors have proven them­selves as dis­crete com­pon­ents, the next step will be to move them into the chip. The final goal is to build them dir­ectly on the sil­ic­on. Smol­tek already has the tech­no­logy for this.

Once on sil­ic­on, Smol­tek can help the semi­con­duct­or industry with many oth­er things too. For example, cre­at­ing chips with mul­tiple sil­ic­on lay­ers where Smoltek’s car­bon nan­ofibers can act as mini­ature spacers, solder joint rein­force­ment bars, or elec­tric­al con­duct­ors. Smoltek’s tech­no­logy can also dis­sip­ate the heat gen­er­ated inside the chip, thereby mak­ing cool­ing easier.

New opportunities in the green industry and energy sectors

Smol­tek has focused on the semi­con­duct­or industry from the very begin­ning. It came nat­ur­ally; Shafiq’s research was about cre­at­ing car­bon nano­struc­tures on CMOS semi­con­duct­ors, and the semi­con­duct­or industry needs new solu­tions to keep doub­ling the num­ber of tran­sist­ors every two years.

But Smoltek’s tech­no­logy has many applic­a­tions far bey­ond the semi­con­duct­or industry. There­fore, Smol­tek has moved the semi­con­duct­or endeavor into its own busi­ness unit, called Smol­tek Semi, and added a new busi­ness unit, called Smol­tek Innov­a­tion, with the mis­sion to pur­sue oth­er applications.

Just as Smol­tek Semi has stra­tegic­ally chosen to focus on car­bon nan­ofibre capa­cit­ors, Smol­tek Innov­a­tion has stra­tegic­ally placed hydro­gen pro­duc­tion in its focal point. Hydro­gen has emerged as the key to mak­ing heavy industry car­bon-free and stor­ing renew­able energy. Two applic­a­tion areas of imme­di­ate vital importance.

Fossil-free steel

In heavy industry, pro­jects are under­way to reduce their use of fossil fuels and green­house gas emissions.

In Sweden, for example, the min­ing com­pany LKAB, the steel man­u­fac­turer SSAB and the energy com­pany Vat­ten­fall are work­ing on a joint pro­ject to devel­op fossil-free steel. Hydro­gen gas has an essen­tial func­tion in this con­text; the gas replaces coal and coke in steel production.

The tech­no­logy can reduce car­bon diox­ide emis­sions from the Swedish industry by a third, and in the future, help reduce emis­sions from iron and steel pro­duc­tion worldwide.

How­ever, there is a catch. If the steel is to be fossil-free, the hydro­gen must be pro­duced in a renew­able way.

The dilemma of intermittent power supply

Hydro­gen can be pro­duced by run­ning elec­tri­city through water. In this pro­cess, water, con­sist­ing of two hydro­gen atoms and one oxy­gen atom, is splintered into hydro­gen gas and oxy­gen gas.

But for this hydro­gen pro­duc­tion to be fossil-free, the elec­tri­city used must also be fossil-free and prefer­ably pro­duced from renew­able sources. Thus, the pro­duc­tion of hydro­gen must use elec­tri­city pro­duced by sol­ar, wind, or water.

Such elec­tri­city is not always in con­stant sup­ply; the sun goes into the clouds, the wind slack­ens, and water reser­voirs dry up. So the pro­cess of pro­du­cing hydro­gen must work in the pres­ence of an inter­mit­tent power supply.

There are two main ways to pro­duce hydro­gen by run­ning elec­tri­city through water.

Electrolysis the old way

The old­est and most con­ven­tion­al way of pro­du­cing hydro­gen is alkaline elec­tro­lys­is. In this pro­cess, lye (potassi­um hydrox­ide or sodi­um hydrox­ide), which is highly cor­ros­ive, is added, and elec­tri­city is applied through two elec­trodes made of a nick­el alloy. These elec­trodes are sep­ar­ated by a mem­brane which allows hydrox­ide ions (OH-) to flow through, on their way from one elec­trode to the oth­er, while sep­ar­at­ing the hydro­gen gas pro­duced at one elec­trode from the oxy­gen gas pro­duced at the other.

This tech­nique has sev­er­al dis­ad­vant­ages. Mainly is the low effi­ciency. The energy value of the hydro­gen gen­er­ated is only 65% of the energy sup­plied. In addi­tion, the meth­od works poorly when the avail­ab­il­ity of elec­tri­city varies.

Electrolysis with carbon nanofibers

A bet­ter tech­nique is poly­mer elec­tro­lyte mem­brane (PEM) elec­tro­lys­is. Its main advant­ages are high effi­ciency, cur­rently upwards of 80%, and expec­ted to reach 86% by 2030. In addi­tion, the meth­od works even when the elec­tri­city is fluc­tu­at­ing, mak­ing it suit­able for use with renew­able energy sources such as sol­ar and wind.

But the elec­trodes immersed in water on either side of the mem­brane must be coated with the scarce and pre­cious metals plat­in­um and iridi­um. For com­par­is­on, gold is 40 times more abund­ant in the Earth’s crust than iridi­um. The annu­al pro­duc­tion is just three tonnes.

This is where Smoltek’s tech­no­logy comes in.

Smoltek’s tech­no­logy allows particles of the rare and pre­cious metals to be placed at the tip of car­bon nan­ofibers, which in turn are placed in a way that max­im­izes expos­ure. In this way, the elec­trodes can be made up to three times more effi­cient while redu­cing the amount of pre­cious met­al needed. This, in turn, can lead to sav­ings of up to 30 per­cent for hydro­gen pro­duc­tion plants.

Energy storage with carbon nanofibers

The same meth­od can be used for energy storage.

A sore point for renew­ables like sol­ar and wind is the dif­fi­culty of stor­ing the energy pro­duced. Sol­ar energy can be stored in bat­ter­ies for short peri­ods, but to save the energy pro­duced dur­ing the many hours of sun­shine in sum­mer for the dark and cold sea­son requires an entirely dif­fer­ent stor­age tech­no­logy. This is where hydro­gen comes in.

When renew­able sources pro­duce excess elec­tri­city, the sur­plus is con­ver­ted into hydro­gen stored for later use. The oxy­gen emit­ted as a by-product is released or used for vari­ous purposes.

The hydro­gen thus cre­ated can then be used in fuel cells. They pro­duce elec­tri­city from hydro­gen, with only water vapor as a by-product.

One father and two godfathers

As act­ive own­ers, Finn Gram­naes and Peter Enkos­son have taken on the task of lift­ing their gaze to see the forest for the trees. And what they are glimpsing at the end of the forest is an envir­on­ment­ally friendly product line—made pos­sible with Smoltek’s technology.

Robotic prosthetic legs

In the early 2000s, when Finn Gram­naes was still look­ing for some­thing mean­ing­ful to do, and his daugh­ter Lisa had just gradu­ated with a bachelor’s degree in mech­an­ics, the two began devel­op­ing an arti­fi­cial leg. Their ambi­tious goal was to cre­ate a pros­thes­is that even bet­ter mim­ics human move­ment using advanced sensor tech­no­logy and elec­tric motor technology.

“We par­ti­cip­ated in some uni­ver­sity pro­jects and learned bit by bit how to build a robot­ic leg pros­thes­is,” Finn Gram­naes says. They were even­tu­ally able to pat­ent an advanced robot­ic pros­thet­ic leg.

But the effort was in vain. The pros­thes­is could not be made; the tech­no­logy wasn’t com­mer­cially avail­able. “We were way ahead of our time,” Finn Gram­naes says, adding, “The bat­tery tech­no­logy was not developed. There were not the kind of motors that were needed. Micro­pro­cessors needed to be smal­ler and more power­ful. In par­tic­u­lar, sensors were needed that could detect dif­fer­ent move­ment pat­terns and sur­faces under real-life conditions.”

Around the corner: Biosensors

Shortly after Finn Gram­naes real­ized that the advanced tech­no­logy he needed was not avail­able, someone gave him the text writ­ten by Smoltek—the one that made him cry out, “Wow! There it is.”

What clicked when he read about their tech­no­logy was the poten­tial to solve many of the prob­lems he and his daugh­ter had iden­ti­fied. One example is the pos­sib­il­ity of devel­op­ing bio­sensors. Car­bon nan­ofibers are sig­ni­fic­antly smal­ler than cells. There­fore, they can be used to con­nect indi­vidu­al neur­ons to elec­tron­ics elec­tric­ally. Some­thing neces­sary to con­trol a robot­ic pros­thet­ic leg with only the mind.

Pre­cisely this, cre­at­ing a tiny chip with car­bon fiber sensors, sig­nal amp­li­fic­a­tion, and an elec­tric­al inter­face, is among the things Smol­tek Innov­a­tion is look­ing at right now, in 2021. So maybe tomorrow’s par­ents, who in the past had to per­suade their chil­dren to remove a body part, can instead com­fort their child with the fact that there are robot­ic pros­theses that, thanks to Smol­tek, can be con­trolled with the power of thought.

May the force be with them.