Nanolab lights the way for Swiss optoelectronics firms

The laboratory is helping Swiss optoelectronics companies exploit nanotechnology Keystone Archive

A new nano and micro technology laboratory in Zurich is helping Swiss optoelectronics companies exploit nanotechnology to quickly bring to market cutting edge lasers for industrial applications.

“The first products to emerge from the lab will be active photonics components,” according to Andros Payne, CEO of Gigatera in Dietikon, Switzerland. The facility’s founders hope that the photonics work is just the beginning of a range of exciting developments emerging from interdisciplinary projects.

Dubbed FIRSTlab (an acronym for Frontiers in Research, Space and Time) the nanotechnology lab opened in July at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology’s Zurich campus.

Payne’s company, a venture-funded spin-off from the Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, is one of the first three Swiss technology firms to sign up with the lab for advanced research.

The other two firms, also making products for the optoelectronics industry, are Avalon Photonics (Zurich), an Intel-backed maker of powerful short range lasers in chip format (known in the industry as VCSLs), and OptoSpeed (Manno), a manufacturer of fiber optic transceivers and receivers.

GigaTera is working on semiconductor devices with many tiny mirrors built in that will eventually form the basis of sub-systems that manage the transport of light in high speed optical data and telecommunications networks.

But photonics is not the only field to benefit from the university’s investment. The lab is staffed by a team of researchers from a range of faculties, not just the electronics engineering and solid state physics groups, as the first three projects suggests.

For example, Professor Dr Nicholas D. Spencer is going to be using the lab to study friction on the nano scale. According to Ensslin, some of Spencer’s experiments make him a leader in the field of “surface biocompatibility”.

If Spencer is successful in pushing the current levels of understanding of nanopatterns and their effect on anorganic surfaces, it could lead to better cell adhesion technologies, something that is important for the successful use of medical implants.

Other researchers slated to work in the lab include those doing nanomechanics, nanostructuring of materials and surfaces, circuits and ICs, advanced packaging and nano-scale devices.

From research to revenues

Each professor and research team has the task of balancing basic and applied research. Applied research means that the projects involve a close working relationship with a high tech company, either local or international.

In that way, the university (and its funding bodies ) hope that technology transfer will be expedited to benefit the economy.

The lab’s plan to combine basic and applied research is sensible from a commercial perspective, according to Marlene Bourne, a micro and nanotechnology analyst at InSTAT-MDR, a market research firm in the US.

She says that to “move the technology forward” these laboratories need to have “a bit of both, a balance between applied and basic research”.

How likely is it that concrete commercial applications will emerge from the lab? Well if the track record of the Federal Institute of Technology is anything to go by, chances are high that we will see new products or processes emerging soon. The university’s researchers spin off their research into commercial ventures at the same rate as MIT or Stanford in California.

Nanostructures important for future chips

Dr Klaus Ensslin, one of the originators of the lab points out that much of the same equipment used in semiconductor manufacturing processes is used by researchers in nanoscience.

Ensslin, for example, uses a basic tool for nanotechnology, the atomic force microscope, to carry out nanofabrication experiments, tailoring the shapes and size of nanostructures that could eventually be used to carry out the “printing” of tiny integrated circuits in the semiconductor industry.

Rather than just use the microscope to look, Ensslin’s team sends a charge down the very sharp needle that forms the business end of an atomic force microscope.

The charge oxidizes a tiny structure on top of the silicon substrate. In this way scientists “write” or lay in tiny 50 nanometer wide lines, which can then be used to for the next phase of semiconductor wafer processing.

This technique is key to being able to produce smaller and smaller integrated circuits, say the experts, as it can be used in the lithography step of semiconductor manufacturing.

“Along with electron beam lithography, these represent the only way to achieve the extremely high resolution lithography required by future generations of processors,” says Peter De Wolf, the European sales director for Veeco, the company that supplied the Swiss lab with its atomic force microscope.

The Ensslin group is a pioneer of this kind of nanolithography, according to De Wolf.

by Valerie Thompson