Nanotechnology Now - Press Release: NanoInk Licenses Family of Patents

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Abstract:
NanoInk, Inc. announces its worldwide, exclusive license of a family of patents from the University of Illinois. The family is entitled “Nanoscale Chemical Surface Patterning Dip Pens”

NanoInk Licenses Family of Patents from the University of Illinois to Strengthen Its Industrial Offerings

Chicago, Ill – October 28, 2004

NanoInk, Inc. announces its worldwide, exclusive license of a family of patents from the University of Illinois. The family is entitled “Nanoscale Chemical Surface Patterning Dip Pens” and includes United States Patent No. 6,642,129 and numerous foreign filings. This license adds to NanoInk’s sizable patent portfolio, which already includes over 100 filings.

The technology licensed involves arrays of “active pens” for performing nanoscale lithography, and it resulted from the work of Dr. Chang Liu, NanoInk Scientific Advisory Board member and Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign. The arrays are important for improving the flexibility and speed of the Dip Pen Nanolithography™ (DPN™) process for nanofabrication, and as a result, for its possible industrial applications.

“This license is an important milestone for the company for two reasons,” said Dr. Cedric Loiret-Bernal, NanoInk’s CEO. “It demonstrates, yet again, the widening use and acceptance of the DPN process by the research community. It also reaffirms our commitment to leverage the DPN process into a platform that can provide revolutionary products and manufacturing improvements in the pharmaceutical, photomask, and flat panel display industries.”

Among the near term industrial applications that can be enabled by the DPN process is the repair of photomasks for semiconductor chips. Active pen technology from the University of Illinois will make NanoInk’s DPN solution much faster, more accurate, and more reliable for its partners and customers.

The DPN process, when it was initially invented, used only a single “pen” to pattern materials onto surfaces at nanoscale dimensions. Arrays of active pens, which allow patterning by large numbers of independently controllable pens at the same time, allow the core DPN process to be performed reliably and with much higher, industrial-scale throughput.

About NanoInk, Inc.

NanoInk’s mission is to become the world leader in nanometer-scale manufacturing and applications development. Because of its unmatched flexibility, high resolution, accuracy, and scalability, NanoInk’s DPN™ nanofabrication technology allows the development of new or improved products that would have been impossible or cost-prohibitive to create in the past. Near-term applications of DPN include nanoscale brand protection, nanoscale additive repair, and nanoscale rapid prototyping. NanoInk continues to build its robust intellectual property portfolio – which now includes patents issued in the U.S. and Taiwan and in-licensing agreements with Northwestern University, Stanford University, and the University of Illinois – by filing over 100 patent applications worldwide. For more information, please go to www.nanoink.net/.