Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1098973
46 SMT007 MAGAZINE I APRIL 2019 Matties: You're at the FLEX Tech show for your business development strategy. Can you talk about that? Diament: The core of the technology is nanow- ire sensing capability. As I mentioned, we are discovering more and more capabilities of it as we go along. One of the things we're trying to do is narrow down our market space. Being a sensors company, we have the advantage and disadvantage of having a broad range of appli- cations, including anything from aerospace to natural gas, microfluidics, and e-cigarettes; systems in all of these sectors can use our sensors. Right now, we're in the stage of find- ing what the most profitable ventures for us to pursue and develop specific solutions for are; once we hone in on those market segments, we're going to focus our efforts there in the coming years. Matties: Profit is one measure. What markets are you most interested in with profit aside? Diament: For us, high-volume markets are attractive. One of the ways we see our sensor being useful is as a cheap, high-performance sensor—the MEMS production process we've pioneered allows it to be produced in high volume at a low cost to bring high-fidelity fluid sensing to a variety of markets. Matties: What type of fluids? Is it any particu- lar fluids? Diament: Our sensors were originally invented to work in airflow specifically, but we've extended our capabilities to most non-corro- sive gases as well as liquids. Sensor perfor- mance in different fluids is an active area of R&D right now. We're seeing a lot of promising results, especially in microfluidics where the small scale necessitates a very low-footprint sensor, such as our nanowires. Matties: You mentioned vaping is a big market too? Diament: It's a large, growing market. It's also an ideal application for our nanowires because the device is highly dependent on the sensor. The e-cigarette/vape needs to be able to accu- rately measure the strength of the user's inhale to deliver the correct amount of power to the heater and create the most satisfying user experience. Matties: More isn't always better. Diament: Exactly. Matties: Have you encountered any opportuni- ties while being here? Diament: Yes, there have been a few interesting opportuni- ties I've run into. One involved a MEMS fabricator located in the Netherlands, which is currently producing organ-on- a-chip products. The company has flow sensors embedded into this module, but they're not meeting the required accu- racy specifications. That's somewhere we can see our nanowires adding value— on-chip integration of our nanowire flow sensors to bring more accurate sensing to these organ-on-a-chip modules. Instrumems sensors are small enough to be used in a wide variety of new applications.