Edge cutters

So you need some cash to fund your harebrained research because your company won't fund it and no VC will touch it? One avenue is the Advanced Technology Program (ATP), run by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The latest ATP award winners were
announced in May. The list of 35 honorees includes people from the IC, MEMS, and nanoelectronics realms as well as folks working on 3-D facial recognition systems, advanced fuel-cell materials, and engineered rotator-cuff tendon tissue.

Discera of Campbell, CA, scored a couple of mil to develop a MEMS-based "radio receiver on a chip." It hopes to use a standard process that will allow all the passive components—oscillators, switches, filters, antennas—to be produced on the same wafer, while maintaining the needed performance in each device. The gigahertz gizmos could be used in future "smart" tags.

Grabbing a sizeable chunk of ATP change was the nanoimprint lithography project team led by Austin-based Molecular Imprints.
It will continue efforts to design and demonstrate step-and-flash imprint litho for molding device features at 20 nm and smaller. The rub will be making the technique work for low-defect, high-volume CMOS
devices, and laying the basis for the infrastructure to support the alt.litho technique. With a little help from the Feds, the team hopes to make their mark—over and over again—on the chipmaking world.