A stamping technology developed by the Quantum Science Research operation of Hewlett-Packard Labs appears ready to start strutting its stuff out in the marketplace. Dubbed nanoimprint lithography (NIL), the technology has been used by HP to create prototype circuits with lines as narrow as 15 nanometers. This figure, according to HP, is "about one-third the dimension of the features in the most advanced circuits that will be commercially available this year."

HP licensed the NIL technology in May of this year to a startup named Nanolithosolutions, which might be considered something of an HP spinout, given that it is the recipient of HP equity funding and that one of its two cofounders is a former employee of HP Labs. Nanolithosolutions' contribution to the furtherance of the technology so far consists of a modular NIL tool for photolithographic mask- alignment equipment.

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The Nano 50" awards for 2007 won't be presented until the National Nano Engineering Conference takes place in Boston in mid-November, but Nanotech Briefs--an on-line publication of APB International--has revealed the 50 "innovators, technologies and products" it deems to have been the most significant during the past year in forwarding the progress of nanotechnology.

The award recipients are spread across Australia Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Israel, Japan, Korea and the Netherlands, but the vast majority are located in the U.S., with nineteen states and the District of Columbia all represented in the slate of winners. The intense academic involvement in nanotechnology development is reflected in awards given by the on-line magazine to individuals and technologies at twelve U.S. universities located in California, Florida, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Virginia and Texas.

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The ink-jet printing of thin-film circuitry for active-matrix displays has been discussed in the technical literature since at least the late 1990s, and Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) has reported its progress in this area in a long string of papers tracing back to 2002.

The research center has developed a "digital lithography" technique that it is proving out for both conventional amorphous-silicon active-matrix arrays and, more recently, for arrays of polymer thin-film transistors (TFTs). The PARC technique is based on the printing of a mask structure on a substrate using a phase-change material "such as wax."

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A special section in last month's Journal of the Society for Information Display provides a small window into the R&D community's continuing quest to achieve flexible electronics and displays. Compiled by self-described "flexible display enthusiast" Dr. Anna Chwang of Caliper Life Sciences, the ten technical articles in this excellent section on active-matrix arrays for flexible display applications demonstrates the diversity of the quest.

Five articles of ten are directly related to flexible substrates; three of these projects sit on a foundation of steel, the two others on plastic. The active-matrix technologies discussed in the articles represent the major silicon alternatives--amorphous silicon, polycrystalline silicon and single-crystal CMOS silicon--in addition to three approaches to organic circuitry.

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And so, Cambridge Display Technology is passing the polymer-OLED baton to Sumitomo Chemical in the culmination of a six-year relationship that has grown closer and closer over time. (See Speculations on the CDT Acquisition, July 31, 2007.) It seems that CDT, which has been t.h.e. hub for polymer OLED development for nearly 15 years, is finally getting the big brother (with big pockets) it has always needed, and polymer OLEDs are gaining the champion with staying power that they have sorely lacked.

Is this good news or bad news for polymer OLEDs? A good or a bad deal for Sumitomo?

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