Anasys Instruments’ nano-TA wins 2007 R&D 100 Award

Anasys Instruments announced today that its nano-TA^® sub-100nm local thermal analysis product is a recipient of the prestigious R&D100 award for 2007. A panel of industry experts appointed by Research and Development magazine announced the nano-TA’s award “…as one of the 100 most technologically significant products introduced into the marketplace over the past year.”

Nanoscale thermal analysis (nano-TA) enables the study of thermal properties locally at sub-100nm resolution, an improvement of over fifty times that of existing technologies. Users of nano-TA are found in many Fortune-500 companies, especially those in the polymer and pharmaceutical markets. These markets have many applications on the sub-100nm length scale and while they have used thermal analysis for several decades, they had no means to study thermal properties locally with nanoscale resolution. “The nano-TA fills a critical need in the study of polymer blends and thin films where lack of local thermal analysis techniques on the sub-micron scale has always been a major bottleneck,” said Kevin Kjoller, co-Founder and VP of Research & Engineering at Anasys. Jiping Ye, Head of Material Characterization at Nissan Analytical Research in Yokohama, Japan and a nano-TA user had the following comments: “This is a well deserved award for the nano-TA. While we use the product routinely to enable our AFM obtain quantitative thermal property information on our samples, we continually see new applications as well. For instance, the nano-TA recently helped us overcome the spatial resolution limitation of Raman microscopy to obtain composition information on a particularly complex polymer blend.”

The nano-TA can be interfaced to most commercially available Atomic Force Microscopes (AFM) to produce quantitative thermal property information. This overcomes one of the fundamental obstacles facing AFM users, namely the inability of the AFM to obtain quantitative physical property information on the sample.

This is the second major recognition for Anasys Instruments since their founding in 2005. Anasys scientific co-founder, Prof. Bill King of the University of Illinois, was named by MIT to the TR-35 characterizing his nanoscale thermal probe breakthrough as one of most important scientific developments of 2006.