NTU spin-off spawns Japanese deal

A Nanyang Technological University spin-off has clinched a multi-million dollar deal from Japanese multinational Shimadzu Corp, which wants it's thin diamond film technology. Nanofilm Technolgies was incorporated in May 1999 to undertake the design, manufacture and marketing of this new patented technology.

After five years of R&D and a total investmnet of $2 million, the company has made advances in a new technique of diamond thin film deposition, called Filtered Cathodic Vacuum Arc (FCVA). The diamond film posseses a hardness that is 70 per cent of a natural diamond's and a thickness of 3-4 nanaometres which is nearly half the current film thickness, said the company.The potential of this technology lies in it's versatility which enables the commercial production of a whole range of products.

Examples include chip and cack-proof sunglasses, prosthetic hip joints that last a lifetime, longer-wearing aircraft components and magnetic recording heads and improvements in data storage capacity in magnetic disk drives. Shimadzu, a leader in the design and manufacture of thin film deposition machines, has signed an original equipment manufacturing agreement with Nanofilm to purchase it's FCVA sources to manufacture film deposition machines for disk drive slider head overcoat applications. The list price of the machines will be US$2 million to US$2.5 million. Shimadzu estimates the annual market for this application alone to be about US$40 million. Nanofilm has alsobegun talks with other potential industry partners for the sale of other applications of it's FCVA sources. Once these applications take off, the firm expects turnover to exceed US$20 million a year.