Advances in Nanoelectronics by Nanosys Scientific Founders Honored as the Breakthrough of the Year by Science Magazine

Cambridge, MA - (January 7, 2002). Nanosys Incorporated announced today that Science Magazine has cited the work of Nanosys Scientific Founders, Professors Charles Lieber at Harvard University and James Heath at UCLA, as the core research leading to the Scientific Breakthrough of the Year 2001. In January of this year the team led by Charles Lieber arranged nanowires into a simple crossbar architecture that allowed communication among tiny nanowires one ten thousandths the width of a human hair. Professor Jim Heath’s team at UCLA demonstrated in April that a simple 16-bit memory circuit could be built from semiconducting crossbars that took advantage of chemical transistor switches made from organically synthesized molecules. A technical tour de force in nanoelectronic circuit design came from a November 8, 2002 Science article by Charles Lieber’s group -- which constructed logic circuits from silicon and gallium nitride nanowires. The Lieber paper demonstrated that all of the important logic functions for building complex circuits can be built from a bottom-up assembly process of chemically synthesized nanowires. These important advances provide a foundation for Nanosys to build the nanoelectronic devices and chips of the future.

Last month Professor Lieber was honored for his visionary work by winning the 2001 Feynman Prize for Nanotechnology. Nanosys Incorporated stands to be a beneficiary of Lieber’s work, as the Company announced the licensing a broad array of key patents and patent applications in nanotechnology from Harvard University. This disruptive technology set – which Nanosys owns the exclusive, worldwide rights to -- has the potential to supplant current microelectronic manufacturing strategies, and enable vastly more powerful computational and electronics platforms. The Scientific Advisory Board continues to work with the Nanosys executive team to identify additional sets of core technology to build the preeminent nanotechnology company.

“Professor Lieber and his students have demonstrated a revolutionary advance in nanoscale computation and reproducible bottom-up assembly of basic logic device elements," said Larry Bock, CEO of Nanosys. "The ability to create a logic circuit from bottom up assembly processes represents just a single application under the control of Nanosys. We expect the same nanowire technology platform to be essential in transforming the fields of molecular sensing and opto-electronics."

“Using a simple crossbar architecture of a p-doped nanowire with an n-type nanowire, our group has been able to assemble rationally a wide range of nanowire junction arrays configured as basic nanoscale logic gate structures with high gain for the first time, “ said Dr. Lieber. A completely new and break-through idea in this work is that different nanowire building blocks are used to define all key nanoscale metrics without the need for top-down lithographic techniques. “With this new approach we can readily extrapolate far beyond expectations of the semiconductor roadmap, and do so using inexpensive bottom-up manufacturing approach,” said Lieber.

About Professor Charles Lieber

Dr. Lieber is a Scientific Founder of Nanosys, Inc., a Member of the Board of Directors, and Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board. Dr. Lieber is the Mark Hyman Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University. Dr. Lieber is the world’s leading authority on the synthesis of one-dimensional, nano-structured materials (nanowires), and on the design of nanowire enabled devices. Dr. Lieber’s laboratory is able to rationally design, control and scale the first robust building blocks of nanoscale device architecture. His laboratory has created prototypes for nano-scale devices with biological, electronic and optoelectronic applications. Dr. Lieber has won numerous awards including the Feynman Prize for Nanotechnology, the Creativity Award of the National Science Foundation, the Leo Hendrik Baekeland Award from the American Chemical Society, the Materials Research Society Outstanding Young Investigator Award, and the Presidential Young Investigators Award. Dr. Lieber graduated with a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Stanford University and carried out his Post Doctoral work at the California Institute of Technology. Prior to taking his position at Harvard, Dr. Lieber was a Professor of Chemistry at Columbia University.

About Professor James Heath

Dr. Heath is a Scientific Founder of Nanosys, Inc., and a Member of the Scientific Advisory Board. Dr. Heath is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of California-Los Angeles and the Scientific Director of the California NanoSystems Institute. Dr. Heath is a world leader in the chemical assembly of quantum based superstructures with a long-term vision for assembling quantum devices. Dr. Heath’s awards include the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences, the Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology, the Jules Spring Prize for Applied Physics, Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Sloan Fellowship, the Seaborg Award, the Packard Fellowship, and NSF National Young Investigator Award Winner. Professor Heath carried out his graduate work at Rice University. His thesis work on the chemistry of Buckminsterfullerene was instrumental in the award of the Nobel Prize for his thesis advisor, Professor Richard Smalley. His graduate studies were followed by a Post Doctoral fellowship at the University of California-Berkeley.

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