[extropy-chat] Nanotech startups are the latest technology gold rush. One company is making a killing selling pans to the prospectors.

[Adrian Tymes]

But what they're actually selling is just a relatively
common part of the system one would need for
advanced nanomanufacturing.  Specifically, vapor
deposition systems that add material after you've
already created a pattern by some other means, while
a lot of the trickiness and functionality (at least
from my own nano experiments) comes from the processes
that create said patterns in the first place.

--- Giu1i0 Pri5c0 <pgptag at gmail.com> wrote:

> Waves of investment in new technology are often
> likened to gold rushes
> in their cycles of boundless enthusiasm, frenzied
> activity—and
> disappointment for the vast majority of people for
> whom things don't
> quite pan out. Entrepreneurs bear the most risk in
> that they wager
> years of their lives (not to mention personal
> savings) on individual
> claims, whereas investors can spread their bets
> around in the hope
> that at least one promising property will make good.
> Even the
> certainty that a budding technology will change the
> world is no more
> help in making money than the certainty that there
> really is gold
> somewhere in them thar hills. The typical hundred
> dollars invested in
> Internet startups in 2000 would barely pay for a
> snail-mail stamp
> today. Clearly, transmuting raw hope into net
> profits requires
> investors and entrepreneurs to place extremely
> prescient and/or damn
> lucky bets on those rare companies that will
> actually convert
> cutting-edge research into commercially successful
> products.
> Or does it? Brian Lim, founder and CEO of Santa
> Barbara, CA-based
> Atomate, believes he has found a unique way of
> capitalizing on the
> latest gold rush, nanotechnology. Rather than
> attempting to develop
> specific nanotech products, such as nanowires or
> nanomachines, Lim and
> his colleagues are selling fabrication systems to
> other nanotech
> researchers. "We're selling the pans to the
> prospectors," he says—not
> trying to do the prospecting.
> Atomate's "pans" are a bit more sophisticated than
> those of yore.
> Fabricating nanotech devices is intrinsically
> difficult and requires
> specialized machinery. "Nanotech researchers have
> been purchasing
> equipment designed to fabricate microchips on
> silicon and then
> customizing it for nanotechnology," Lim explains. He
> and his team,
> which includes several experienced
> nanotechnologists, realized that
> they could provide a tremendous boost to
> researchers, many of whom
> operate on constrained university budgets, by
> producing equipment
> that's already adapted for the nano world.
> According to Lim, a researcher might spend $100,000
> or more on a
> silicon fabrication machine and then invest another
> $50,000, plus
> several valuable months, modifying it before he or
> she could carry out
> any nanotech experiments. Instead, the researcher
> can purchase a
> ready-built system from Atomate and be up and
> running much more
> quickly for "about the price of a Volvo."
>
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/04/10/chung1004.asp?p=1
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