Technology
Aneeve technology drivers can be summaried as:
- Semiconductor Industry: Thanks to the nanoelectronic industry's continued push in maintaining Moore's law (double of transistor density every 18-24 months), processors with over millions and even billions of transistors are becoming common place. For instance, Intel's dual-core Intel Itanium processor contains 1.7 billion transistors and IBM's Cell chip used in the Playstation 3 has about 240 million transistors. Clearly there is a strong impetus to drive the scaling in nanoelectronics to further the increase of functional throughput in maintaining Moore’s law. Scaling of existing CMOS will continue over the next decade and, according to ITRS Roadmap, CMOS will reach the 7-nm physical gate length by 2018. To ensure scaling trends continue past 2018, Aneeve is pioneering CMOS augmentation technologies based on hybrid CMOS solutions. Low-cost technologies such as ink-jet printed CNT systems and based CNT sensors are just some other technologies developed.
- Energy Industry: With the price of oil reaching record hights, the needs to derive low cost, abundant and sustainable energy is crucial. Solar based technologies fulfills this need. Understanding the economic and technology limits of polysilicon based solar cells, Aneeve is strategically focusing on developing ultra low cost polymer based solar cells incorporating nanotechnology elements such as CNTs.
- Defense Industry (Carbon Nanomaterials): Graphene exhibits the highest electronic quality among all known materials, a profound discovery that occurred less than 4 years ago. Although theorists have known of graphene for over 60 years, the community has been delighted to be able to confirm the materials remarkable electronic properties. Graphene has an astonishing 200,000 cm2/Vs which is over 100 times that of silicon. Such high electron mobility lends it to be an extremely efficient conductor and also lends it to be used for high performance devices for both high power (power FETs) and low power (integrated circuit) applications. Graphene also exhibits high gain and high frequency operation in terahertz (THz) frequencies making it useful in analog and RF circuit applications. Other aspects include graphene's exceptional thermal conductivity been measured up to 5850 W/mK (50x more than silicon) quiet possibly making it a superior material for thermal management of nanoscale devices. Graphene has also been shown to be a super sensitive sensor detecting individual gas molecules, reaching ultimate sensor sensitivity. Promising applications include detecting harmful biological and gaseous substances among others.
