I haven't really made great strides catching up on my EE Times reading. I'm still about 23 months behind. Still, I haven't fallen any farther behind, so I suppose that's a good sign.
Ran across this story in the March 08, 2004 paper:
Nanochip Inc, a startup developing a MEMS storage product somewhat similar to IBM Corp's Millipede research effort, said last week it has secured $20 million in second-round funding that will be used to take its technology to the product stage.Excellent--its early 2006, lets see how they're doing.Gordon Knight, CEO of the 10-person startup, said the Nanochip technology is capable of terabit-per-square-inch densities, is not fragile, and can be rewritten billions of times.
IBM's read/write head addresses the entire surface of the media. "There are technical merits to both approaches, but I think our approach is more-manufacturable," Knight said.
Meanwhile, Nanochip has "a ton of work to do" to prepare a product for market, added Knight, who estimated that Nanochip may be in production by the end of 2005.
Web site is is still there, but doesn't look like its been updated since March of 2004 when the article came out. Verifying that by browsing the image/ directory. Everything was thrown up 07-Mar-2004 except for one image that was updated on the 17th.
Web site has a phone number, so what the heck, lets call it:
"Hello, this is Kim." (not her real name)This company was originally founded by Tom Rust who put his own money into starting it up as well as drawing on investments from so other personal investors. It doesn't sound like they've moved very far past the early garage days.
"Is this Nanochip?" I ask.
"Yes."
"Are you still in business?"
"Yes."
"Are you still actively developing your high density storage solution?"
"Um. Yes."
"Ok, thanks."
"Thats all?" she asks.
"Sure."
"Oh. Ok. Goodbye."
Probably confused the heck out of them with my call ...
"Who was that that called?"
"I don't know?"
"You don't know? What did they want?"
"They wanted to know if we were still in business."
"That's it?"
"Yes."
"Weird."
"Yes."
