In their study, Global Industry Analysts, Inc. (GIA) notes the success of nanotechnology commercialization in the healthcare and electronics section will bolster revenues for all products incorporating nanoscale technologies over the next decade. The GIA’s report also looks at government spending in nanotechnology research and development--from 2006 to 2010, Japan will be the world leader in this category, providing about $6 Billion US for nanotech R&D. The US is not too far behind with a projected $5.6 Billion US dedicated to nanotech R&D, followed by the European Union at about $4.6 Billion US for the same period.

Nox Defense in Virginia has created the Nox Intelligent Perimeter Defense system, which is able to track assets and people in real time. These advanced ‘spy chips’ use a combination of high-resolution video and RFID tags, and cannot be seen by the naked eye. The company states the FBI has been one of the early adopters of the system, and it is available to other federal agencies and select companies.

This is the second time the NASDAQ-traded company Third Wave Technologies has received FDA clearance for its molecular testing products. The company’s InPlex™ CF Molecular Test can both detect and identify cystic fibrosis mutations in a patient’s DNA samples. The microfluidic card used for this test was co-developed with the 3M Company. According to the company’s research of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, cystic fibrosis affects more than 30,000 Americans every year, and is the most commonly-inherited disease in the US.

SiMPore, Inc. has been selected to present at the upcoming NSTI Nanotech Ventures in Boston, June 3-5, 2008. Mr. Thomas Gaborski, Co-Founder and Vice President of Business Development for SiMPore, provided us with several update on the company and recent funding and development news.

Mr. Eraldo Batista of Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil provided Nano World News with the following update on its IP.

Lance Liotta, Professor at George Mason University, provides Nano World News with a preview of his upcoming presentation at NSTI Nanotech 2008, and he shares with regards developments related to the technology.

New Scale awarded third U.S. patent for SQUIGGLE motor technology and applications.

Story and update courtesy of Jae-Hyung Chung and Keith Ritala, University of Washington

The way in which fundamental electromagnetic properties scale with dimension determines what electronic circuits can be constructed using nanotechnology. A new theoretical framework for nanotech seeks to use specially designed nanoparticles to create circuits that could lead to optical information processing and optical communication between nanostructures. A few excerpts from Prof posits metananocircuits as electronics’ next frontier, written by Sunny Bains at EE Times, via KurzweillAI.net:

A University of Pennsylvania professor is exploring an approach to nanotechnology that will allow circuit theory to operate in an entirely new regime—one where “current” is no longer defined as the movement of electrons and holes, but instead as an electromagnetic wave.

If Nader Engheta’s theories prove successful in practice—and researchers are already working on experiments to test this—then the work could strike the elusive balance between finding new technologies that can reliably operate at nanometer scales and ensuring that the technologies can bootstrap on decades of knowledge about more-conventional electronics.

For one thing, Engheta said he is interested the possibility of creating switches from metananocircuitry. They could lead to a new kind of optical information processing and, perhaps, a new form of nanoscale computational unit, said Engheta, the H. Nedwill Ramsey Professor of electrical and systems engineering at Penn.

He is also excited about the idea of “wireless at nanoscales using light.” In other words, Engheta said, he’d like to investigate the possibility of optical communication between nanostructures or even cells that could be pressed into service in the same way that RF and microwaves are used at other scales.

George Eleftheriades, professor of electrical and computer engineering and a Canada research chair at the University of Toronto, said Engheta’s work provides “a vision, consisting of building blocks, along with instructions on how to arrange them together to enable transplanting well-known passive inductor-capacitor-resistor [LCR] electrical networks to the optical domain. This includes the direct optical realization of filters, antennas, power-distribution networks, microwave transmission-line metamaterials and many more.”

The building blocks in Engheta’s world are dielectric nanoparticles, Eleftheriades explained. Conventional dielectric nanoparticles—those with positive permittivity—”can realize optical capacitors,” he said, whereas negative plasmonic nanoparticles, which have negative permittivity, can realize optical inductors and resistors.

“What makes these different from conventional electronic networks,” he said, “is that instead of thinking in terms of a conduction current, one should think in terms of the displacement current, which indeed can ‘flow’ in free space and in dielectric materials.”

Nader Engheta’s Web site has more information on his work on Metactronics: Metamaterial-Inspired Nanoelectronics, Circuits with Light at Nanoscale.
—Jim