Is More Being Spent on its Toxicology than on Nanotech Itself?

Government dollars go easily into nanotech research, but nary a cent finds its way into supporting entrepreneurs trying to commercialize nanotechnology

1 min read

As nanotech businesses fall deeper into the abyss, and the high-flyers sink into non-existence, you would think with all the government talk of nanotech being the future and stimulus dollars being spent that one would hear about some actual money being spent to keep nanotech companies going.

Sure, billions are invested in government and university research labs that are supposed to lead to some commercial applications. But they never do because the road from a lab prototype to a commercial product is expensive and there are little or no financial means of support to carry it off.

Shiny and new research centers producing all sorts of research ranging from the “who cares” to the “could be significant” abound but the commercialization of nanotech continues to flounder.

Meanwhile there is an endless chorus of the possible dangers of nanomaterials and their proliferation in consumer products. The last bit always leaves me scratching my head. I could have bought ‘nano pants’ 5 years ago and 5 years later that’s still about all I can buy if I go out looking to buy a nanotech-enabled product.

Despite these sinking fortunes for nanotech companies and products, some researchers manage to strike it rich. A professor at Duke University has just received $14 million to figure out the possible detrimental effects of silver nanoparticles, particularly those used in antibacterial socks.

Well done! Chapeaux! And all of that, but imagine if that kind of money was spent to support companies trying to bridge the financial chasm between a prototype and a product, I might actually be able to go out and buy a pair of nanosilver socks.
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Two Startups Are Bringing Fiber to the Processor

Avicena’s blue microLEDs are the dark horse in a race with Ayar Labs’ laser-based system

5 min read
Diffuse blue light shines from a patterned surface through a ring. A blue cable leads away from it.

Avicena’s microLED chiplets could one day link all the CPUs in a computer cluster together.

Avicena

If a CPU in Seoul sends a byte of data to a processor in Prague, the information covers most of the distance as light, zipping along with no resistance. But put both those processors on the same motherboard, and they’ll need to communicate over energy-sapping copper, which slow the communication speeds possible within computers. Two Silicon Valley startups, Avicena and Ayar Labs, are doing something about that longstanding limit. If they succeed in their attempts to finally bring optical fiber all the way to the processor, it might not just accelerate computing—it might also remake it.

Both companies are developing fiber-connected chiplets, small chips meant to share a high-bandwidth connection with CPUs and other data-hungry silicon in a shared package. They are each ramping up production in 2023, though it may be a couple of years before we see a computer on the market with either product.

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