National Science Foundation Awards Grant to NanoMech

Nanoparticle-based devices promise to overcome limitations encountered in microelectronics manufacturing

Fayetteville, Arkansas - The National Science Foundation has awarded a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant to NanoMech, LLC (www.nanomech.biz) to fund development of nanoparticle-based capacitors. NanoMech's unique process used to form the capacitors produces devices with greatly improved characteristics. These improvements are critical to the electronics manufacturing industry which increasingly seeks miniaturization by integrating passive devices into printed circuit boards.

Nanoparticles are the smallest scale materials currently available to scientists for industrial and biomedical applications. They range in size from about 1/1,000th to 1/10,000th the width of a human hair. "Our novel approach for depositing nano-sized ferroelectric particles in an ordered, multi-layer assembly should provide much better performance compared to the random particle arrangement that has previously been achieved. As new generations of consumer electronics require constantly increasing component densities through use of embedded capacitors, this innovation could prove to be a big boost to U.S electronics manufacturers," says Ajay P. Malshe, Chief Technology Officer of NanoMech.

"NanoMech's core technology for the creation of nanoparticle-based coatings and thin films can be applied in many different high-value applications and this is a good example of an application in microelectronics," noted Calvin Goforth, president of Virtual Incubation Company, a technology enterprise development company that is accelerating NanoMech's growth. "This project will advance the state-of-the-art for fabrication of passive electronic devices, which potentially can be used in wireless communications, portable medical devices and many other consumer and strategic applications."

Nanoparticles' peculiar properties of very high surface area and strong cohesion pose a big challenge to delivery of the materials. Special approaches are required to apply these coatings and NanoMech is at the forefront of creating commercial scale systems. NanoMech is commercializing nanoparticle electrostatic coating technology originally developed by a research team at the University of Arkansas. The commercialization of this innovative technology enables the creation of new classes of nanostructured coatings not otherwise practical with conventional approaches.

This new Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I award is for $100,000. This is the eighth SBIR award NanoMech has received in the past three years.