Mass High Tech - January 29, 2009

Nantero's semiconductors pull high patent power ranking
Cummings Properties Media Release

When one thinks of technology patent leaders, companies such as Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp., and Samsung Electronics Co. spring to mind. Yet nestled among those titans in a recent IEEE ranking of companies with the most powerful technology patent portfolios lies little Nantero Inc., a Woburn-based developer of nanotechnology for semiconductor devices.

Nantero’s 20 patents pale in comparison to the other giants on the list — Intel boasts 1,865 patents in the semiconductor manufacturing category, for example — but officials at the 47-person engineering company said the ranking is reflective of the quality of the company’s intellectual property. What sports scouts would call “upside.”

“What’s distinctive about how we’re doing it is that all our innovation is very practical,” said Nantero CEO and co-founder Greg Schmergel. “It’s not a lot of brainstorming in a room, but solving problems engineers are having in making chips that are manufacturable by the billion in factories.”

Nantero’s patent portfolio, which all revolve around using carbon nanotubes and related materials in the manufacturing of semiconductors, including memory chips, ranks fifth on the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers’ (IEEE) Patent Pipeline Scorecard for semiconductor manufacturing worldwide, beating out names such as SanDisk Corp. (6th), Texas Instruments Inc. (11th) and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (20th). The ranking includes the “impact” of Nantero’s patents (how many patents are cited by other patents in a specific area) and their “generality” (how many are cited across multiple verticals). Nantero scored high on both.

According to Andrew Updegrove, a partner at Boston law firm Gesmer Updegrove LLP who deals with technology licensing issues, such recognition can do more than just validate a company’s business model. “If the company is big enough to assert its patents, high impact or generality indicates the likelihood of high royalty income, as it indicates that lots of other vendors will need to secure licenses to practice the technology,” he said, adding that even for smaller companies, it can increase a company’s acquisition value.

Nantero’s basic material, a nanotube coating for chips that can be used in the sterile environments of semiconductor clean rooms, is now being sold by partner Brewer Science Inc. of Missouri, though executives declined to name any of the original equipment manufacturers using the technology.

But the ultimate goal is the perfection of a nanotube-based random access memory called NRAM, developed by Nantero CTO Thomas Rueckes. Such chips will be faster and more dense than current types of RAM (such as DRAM or Flash) and would be better able to withstand environmental changes such as heat, cold and electromagnetism, according to officials. While the company has developed the research behind NRAM, it has yet to launch it commercially.

While the IEEE Patent Pipeline Scorecard traditionally contains the names of large, well-known technology companies, it has occasionally been a harbinger of technologies and companies on the brink of making an impact on their industry. In 2007, Cambridge-based electronic paper technology developer E-Ink Corp. appeared suddenly in the computer peripherals and storage category, and became the driving technology behind Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle electronic book reader, launched later in 2008.