Archive for May, 2009
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May 29th, 2009
Downturn to spur shift from copper to gold?
According to this report the economic downturn could spur the shift from copper to gold bonding wire. There are good technical (and economic) reasons why this isn’t necessarily so and more on this will follow……
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May 28th, 2009
GOLD 2009 Conference Programme
The provisional programme for GOLD2009 has been announced here……
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May 27th, 2009
Graham Hutchings, FRS
Professor Graham Hutchings has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), one of the highest honours in the academic world, for his pioneering contributions in gold catalysis. As many of you will be aware, Graham was the first to predict and demonstrate that gold would be a highly effective catalyst for ethyne hydrochlorination. I am sure you will join with me in congratulating Graham Hutchings on this award.Full Royal Society citation:
Professor of Physical Chemistry and Director of the Cardiff Catalysis Institute, School of Chemistry, Cardiff University
Distinguished for his work on heterogeneous catalysis, pioneering the use of gold catalysts, being the first to predict and subsequently demonstrate that gold would be a highly effective catalyst for ethyne hydrochlorination, thereby establishing a new field of catalysis. He has taken a leading role in understanding the mechanisms of important C1 reactions. His early work at ICI made discoveries with oxidation catalysts that are still commercially operated. He has led use of in situ methods to determine catalyst structure during reactions and using Raman spectroscopy he demonstrated the key importance of amorphous vanadium phosphates in butane oxidation. He has pioneered enantioselective heterogeneous catalysis using electrostatically immobilised complexes providing a generic approach to the design of stable selective catalysts, and extended this to demonstrate that enantioselective reactions can occur at the gas-solid interface in the absence of solvent, providing facile operability of these complex processes.
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May 26th, 2009
Progress for prototype meningococcal testing device
A prototype meningococcal testing device that was featured in NanoTech Gold News has received investment and support from New Zealand biotechnology firm Trinity Diagnostics. According to co-partner NanoVentures Australia:
The Agreement, signed on 27th April 2009, provides Trinity Diagnostics with an exclusive license to the technology, and commits Trinity to invest in the laboratory verification of the diagnostic system. If this phase is successful, the parties will enter into a full development agreement funded by Trinity and its investors. It is anticipated that the pre-clinical program will take around two years.
The incidence of death and disability resulting from meningococcal disease may be significantly reduced by rapid diagnosis, enabling antibiotic treatment at an earlier stage of disease progression. Currently available tests take between 2 and 48 hours to provide a result, and often involve culturing either blood or cerebrospinal fluid to detect the presence of meningococcal bacteria.
The new diagnostic test has been developed by Quintain NS, a subsidiary of NVA. The Quintain NS meningococcal test is based on nanoparticle and nanocluster technology developed at RMIT University, one of Australia’s leading bioengineering centres. Nanoparticles of gold are covered with antibodies that attract the meningococcal bacteria. In the presence of the bacteria, the gold particles ‘cluster’ together, which provides a simple and rapid means of detection for the disease. Preliminary testing under laboratory conditions has indicated that a diagnosis can be returned in 15 minutes.
This is another great example of how gold nano materials are becoming increasingly important in the medical diagnostic market.
The prototype device featured in NanoTech Gold News
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May 25th, 2009
BBI expand gold reagent market
According to PharmaLive, BBI- the leading manufacturer of gold nanoparticles – have signed a new marketing agreement with AbD Serotec in Munich to co-market each others products and services to their world-wide customer bases. This will expand the market for BBI’s products, ranging from the supply of bulk gold colloid through to high volume manufacture of rapid tests using gold nanoparticles. -
May 22nd, 2009
Gold catalyst demand predicted to grow
This new market report ‘World Nanocatalysts Market’ has a section entitled ‘Industrial demand for gold seen rising’. The exent to which this statement is based on hard numbers is not clear, but it looks like good news……
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May 21st, 2009
Your DVD library on one disc?
A new paper published in Nature and reported here on the BBC has offered the future prospect of storing a complete DVD library on one sngle disc. The research, published by a team at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, says that by adding gold nanomaterials and a “polarisation” dimension to existing technology, storage can be massively boosted without changing the size of a current disc .
W
hen polarized light from a laser is fired onto the gold nanorods it affects only the rods whose orientation matches the direction of polarization, causing them to become spherical. Its through this principle that data can be recorded. At the same time, gold nanorods respond much more efficiently than spherical nanoparticles to low-energy lasers, the so-called ’lightning rod effect’. So the team use a low-energy laser to scan the surface and see which areas have been melted and which haven’t, thereby reading the data.Apparently, the researchers have signed a deal with Samsung Electronics and say that there is the potential to one day store up to 10 terabytes of data on one disc.
Whilst this paper represents another emerging application for gold nanorods, I believe a key challenge for the scientific community is to improve the yields and scale of gold nanorod production such that these are viable commercial materials.
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May 20th, 2009
Industrial demand down
World Gold Council has just released its quarterly Gold Demand Trends publication here. It reports that investment demand for gold, which includes exchange traded funds (ETFs) and bars and coins, was the major source of growth in the quarter, but that the impact of the recession on consumer discretionary spending continued to take its toll on jewellery demand. Industrial demand for gold in Q1’09 was 31% down on Q1’08, with the electronics sector being the major contributor to this decline. End user demand for electronics goods has been badly affected by the downturn in consumer spending on items such as laptops and mobile phones.
The full stats can be viewed here.
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May 19th, 2009
New volume production for X-wire
X-wire technology is a new advanced form of gold bonding wire that offers the opportunity for improvements in microchip design and packaging.The drive for smaller components, increasing system functionality and cost reduction are all competing demands in the electronics industry. To help chip designers and manufacturers address these competing demands, an insulated wire bonding technology known as X-Wire™ was originally developed by a Canadian company, Microbonds Inc in co-operation with several leading gold bonding wire companies around the world. X-Wire™ Technology consists of a proprietary insulation applied to bare bonding wires. The technology overcomes the inherent limitations of bare wire bonding interconnections which have to be designed to ensure that the bare wires do not touch, so avoiding short circuits. In contrast when using insulated wire, chip designers can reduce the criticality of wire clearance, allowing for previously impossible chip designs to be realised.
Yesterday, United Test & Assembly Center (UTAC), Tanaka Denshi Kogyo KK of Japan and Microbonds announced that UTAC has selected Tanaka X-Wire insulated wire bonding technology for volume production.
It has been reported that UTAC performed extensive testing on devices assembled using 20µm and 25µm X-Wire gold based bonding wires produced by Tanaka Denshi Kogyo KK, the volume production licensee of the X-Wire Technology. The X-Wire devices passed key reliability test standards, customer electrical performance test criteria and manufacturing capability tests.
This is a significant new development in maintaining gold’s position as the material of choice for interconnection technology.
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May 18th, 2009
Gold plating on difficult substrates
An example of the engineering components that require precision optical gold coatings
The story of Epner Technologies is a fascinating one. Founded in 1910 it is now one of the world’s leading hi-tech gold plating companies. The company specialises and supplies the US standards body NIST with the standard infrared reflective material.
The company has just announced a new process for achieving blister-free gold plating on some of the more unusual or difficult metals to plate like Titanium, Molybdenum, Tungsten, Magnesium. This allows them to withstand high brazing or soldering temperatures, for applications including coatings for optical and reflective uses in military, defense, aerospace, and medical projects. See here for more….
Richard Holliday
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