Nanusens recently joined as a member of the Torbay EPIC Centre, a new technology complex located in Torbay, a town in the southwestern coast of England, offering over $3M worth of prototyping capability and a classified cleanroom. The complex, funded by the European Union, aims to support technological innovation and promoting collaborative activity between businesses and research institutions. It focuses on supporting high potential companies and encourages investment into Torbay’s microelectronics and photonics sector.
The company has also just secured a new £764,000 (>1 Million USD) round of funding in association with the British Government’s ‘Future Fund’ scheme. "This will power our next phase of growth," says Nanusens CEO, Dr. Josep Montanyà i Silvestre. "Moving our Headquarters to EPIC has proven to be really beneficial to the company. Being right in the heart of a cluster of companies working on high-tech projects provides incredible synergy. The EPIC Centre also allows access to state-of-the-art equipment bought specifically to support companies in the Centre. These include a Palomar Technologies die bonder, worth a million dollars, which is one of the fastest, most reliable, and flexible, multiple die bonders on the market, and a Scanning Electron Microscope to examine our ultra-small devices. In addition, close by, there are the microscopy centers at Plymouth and Exeter. We are actively recruiting and this location has a great pool of local talent. Torbay is such an attractive place to live that we have already had job enquiries from all over the UK."
Wayne Loschi, EPIC Centre Director, added: "This is a great example of the dynamism created by having a cluster of high technology companies all together and helping each other. The whole is certainly greater than the sum of the individual parts!"
Nanusens has already won many awards for its innovative technology that creates sensors that can be used in all sorts of electronic devices to sense movement, sound, magnetic fields, pressure, etc. The company has devised a completely new way to make these sensors that overcomes issues with current sensors that includes challenges with volume product, size, reliability and energy consumption. The solution, which is being protected by many patents, is the only one that uses the same manufacturing techniques that make the vast majority of the world’s electronic chips. This means virtually unlimited production capabilities plus solutions that are ten times smaller or even less.
The MEMS sensors made with the Nanusens process are ten times smaller, taking up very little real estate on the chip. As it uses the same fab as standard CMOS ICs, this presents the possibility to implement the control electronics onto the chip simultaneously. Moreover, several different types of NEMS can be built at the same time, on the same chip, to create a single multi-sensor solution. This is vital in device designs where space is at a premium, such as true wireless earbuds. The Nanusens technology allows increasing the space used for batteries and overcomes the lack of space preventing the additional integration of new sensors to increase functionality.
Founded in 2014 by Dr. Josep Montanyà and Dr. Marc Llamas, Nanusens leverages the research and expertise developed by the founders’ previous company, Baolab Microsystems. Nanusens is VC funded by Inveready, Caixa Capital Risc, Dieco Capital, and crowdfunding via Crowdcube.
www.nanusens.com
