Apologies for infrequent updates of late. Below is the latest on Uniqarta—lot’s going on!
NSF Grant
The NSF project I had previously written about is under way. I have been pleasantly surprised by the support and resources NSF is providing beyond the grant money. They are providing training and experienced advisors to help develop the commercialization plan we will need for our Phase 2 proposal. (A Phase 2 grant can bring us as much as $750K.) They have also connected us into an industry network where we can explore collaboration and investment with a variety of established companies. I’ll be spending a lot of time on this over the next five months as we push for a February Phase 2 proposal submission.
Flexible Hybrid Electronics Manufacturing Innovation Institute
I had previously written about this institute we are participating in. The U.S. government is providing $75 million dollars over five years for an advanced manufacturing institute that will bridge the gap between applied research and large-scale product manufacturing. Last week the Department of Defense awarded the FlexTech
Alliance a $75M/5-year agreement to establish and manage this Institute. Uniqarta has been a core
participant on the FlexTech proposal team and will be a member of the Institute. The team is quite large with over 100 companies, universities and
other entities but Uniqarta is uniquely positioned with our ultra-thin chip
assembly technology. We expect to start participating in this Institute’s projects this fall.
Consumer Product Packaging
We continue to get strong interest to our concept of low-cost, invisible connectivity integrated within product packaging. We are working with a few packaging companies to creating prototypes with which to engage brand owners although I admit this is moving more slowly than I’d like. This seems to be a market that is slow to embrace change and developing it will take longer than I expected. Nevertheless, we have some promising things in the works that I will write about more fully once they get under way.
Licensing
One of the RFID incumbents with whom we have been talking since our start two years ago, has identified a number of market opportunities for ultra-thin, flexible inlays. We are launching a prototyping project that will provide them with ultra-thin NFC inlays with which to sample their customers. If that goes well they will look to license our first-generation technology sometime next year.
Technology Development
We have started work—six months earlier than planned—on our second generation technology development. A key member of my co-founder’s
North Dakota State University team became available this summer to work on this. We’ve been able to re-establish the feasibility demonstration that the NDSU team had previosuly accomplished and are moving ahead to establish our own capability outside the university for process optimization and automation.
It is starting to be clear that a lot of our funding is likely to come from sources other than financial institutions. We have had good luck winning government grants and have some promising funding opportunities with a few establish companies (”strategics”). It remains to be seen to what extent we can depend on these funding sources but for now that is where my fundraising efforts are focused. That’s all for now. I’ll push to update this blog more frequently going forward!