Nanosys Co-Founder and Harvard University Professor, Charles Lieber, Publishes Ground-Breaking Results on High Performance Silicon Nanowire Field Effect Transistors - (Semiconductor nanowires outperform traditional silicon ICs)

Palo Alto, CA - (March 24, 2003). Nanosys Co-founder and Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University, Dr. Charles Lieber, announced the publication of a landmark paper in the January 2003 issue of the prestigious nanotechnology journal, Nano Letters. The paper was authored by Dr Lieber with graduate students Y, Cui, Z. Zhong, D. Wang and W. Wang at Harvard’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. The paper describes high performance Silicon Nanowire Field Effect Transistors (SiNW FETs) that have carrier mobility more than one order of magnitude higher than that of bulk Si. The remarkable carrier mobility of the SiNW FETs shows the promises of single crystal semiconductor nanowires as the building block of next-generation electronic devices that substantially exceed the performance of conventional silicon integrated circuits.

Professor Lieber, one of the world’s foremost authorities in nanotechnology, has pioneered research on the synthesis, assembly and electronic control of semiconductor nanowires for applications ranging from biosensors to photodetectors to light-emitters to nanoelectronics. The technology developed by Dr. Lieber is capable of fabricating nanowires from virtually all of the industrially-important semiconductor materials, such as silicon, germanium, GaAs, InP and GaN, as single crystals with precisely controllable diameters ranging from 2nm to 100nm and lengths up to 200 microns long.

“The results of this most recent work indicate the performance of these unique nanomaterials is superior to that of traditional bulk silicon,” explained Dr. Stephen Empedocles, Director of Business Development and Co-founder of Nanosys, Inc., the exclusive licensee of the technology from Dr. Lieber’s lab. “While it will still be many years before the world sees a commercial ‘nano-computer’, these results still have powerful implications for today’s nanotechnology applications; it demonstrates that chemically fabricated (“bottom-up”) nano materials such as silicon nanowires are fundamentally different than traditional lithographically defined (“top-down”) structures built from bulk materials. This is exactly what nanotechnology is all about – enabling new applications through the fundamentally unique properties of nanometer sized materials!”

When asked about the implication of this technology for nanoelectronics, Dr. Lieber stated “This is an extremely promising result for the future of nanoelectronics. It clearly demonstrates the potential for extreme-performance electronics well-beyond the end of Moore’s Law. Nanotechnology is not simply a process of miniaturization. It is the ability to do things that are completely different than what has been done before.

Nanosys has exclusive license to a broad portfolio of technology developed in the Lieber labs at Harvard, including over twenty five patent and patent applications covering inorganic semiconductor nanowires and their applications. These patents cover fundamental aspects of nanotechnology ranging from biosensors to nanoelectronics as well as the most fundamental nanomaterials composition of matter. These patents complement Nanosys’ other license agreements with MIT, Regents of the University of California Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories.

About Professor 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 a leading authority on the synthesis of one-dimensional nano-structured materials (nanowires), and the design of nanowire enabled devices. Professor 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 biologic, electronic and optoelectronic applications. Professor 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. Professor Lieber graduated with a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Stanford University and carried out his Post Doctoral work at California Institute of Technology. Prior to taking his position at Harvard University, Dr. Lieber was a Professor of Chemistry at Columbia University.

About Nanosys

Nanosys, Inc. is a disruptive platform technology company focused on the development of nanotechnology-enabled systems. These systems incorporate novel and patent-protected zero- and one-dimensional nanocrystals such as nanowires and nanoparticles (quantum dots, quantum rods, etc.) as their principal active elements. These systems exploit the fundamentally unique electronic, magnetic, optical, chemical, processing and integration properties associated with materials having nanometer-scale dimensions. Devices and systems constructed from these materials will revolutionize a broad range of industries from life sciences (molecular sensing) to optoelectronics (LEDs, lasers, photovoltaics, integrated photonics, and displays) to nanoelectronics (non-volatile ultra-fast memory, nano logic circuits and quantum computing). These devices will offer radical and discontinuous performance improvements in speed, sensitivity, power consumption, device density, cost, and integration, as well as enabling new applications never considered using traditional materials. By combining the world’s scientific leaders in nanomaterials, integration and applications with experienced commercial engineers and technologists and a team of seasoned entrepreneurs, Nanosys is turning the promise of nanotechnology into reality

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