Axcess News Covers Nanotechnology Breakthroughs For Investors - News Item

AXcess News released a story covering the latest breakthroughs in nanotechnology and some of the companies’ investors should be watching.

A giant bet in nanotechnology may be the payoff of the century for investors who track this cutting edge technology. Companies like Isonics Corporation amongst the small caps has been making great strides in isotopically-pure silicon-28 with superior thermal properties compared to normal silicon. While IBM, the leader in nanotechnology investments amongst big board companies, announced a new partnership Monday with Stanford University on high-performance, low-power components to help build smaller and faster electronic devices.

The partners said their latest research in the field of "spintronics" could lead to reconfigurable logic devices, room-temperature superconductors and quantum computers in the next five years.

Yet regardless of the breakthroughs in nanotechnology, many companies are moving quickly to harness future applications. Motorola, Honeywell and Cypress Semiconductor have signed licenses for MRAM (magnetic random access memory). MRAM has been called "the ideal memory," potentially combining the density of DRAM with the speed of SRAM and non-volatility of flash memory or disk.

Golden Colorado based Isonics has developed isotopically pure silicon-28 to replace natural silicon in the production of wafers for computer chips.

In March Isonics announced an agreement to acquire the silicon wafer manufacturing business and related assets from EnCompass Materials Group Ltd. (EMG) of Vancouver, Washington, allowing it to move into higher margin wafer sales using its patented silicon technologies.

Isonics recently raised $3.3 million in a private placement of convertible preferred stock to Mercator Advisory Group, LLC. The private placement marked the second capital round for the micro cap company this year, bringing the total to in excess of $5.5 million. Mercator bought both offerings. Proceeds were earmarked for the EMG acquisition's working capital requirements.

Posted 26^th April 2004