Strategic Elements receives funding for liquid printable memory project

Image: Strategic Elements

Strategic Elements, an Australian company developing printable nanotechnology, has received additional financial support from the federal government to supports its ongoing joint research and development program with the CSIRO.

The Nanocube Memory Ink is an advanced nanotechnology material that can be printed or coated onto non-silicon transparent or flexible surfaces, such as glass or plastic, to store and retrieve data.

When printed on a surface and assembled with electrodes, the liquid transparent ink containing billions of tiny nanometer scale cube-shaped particles operates as computer memory or RAM.

The grant funding has been awarded to Strategic Elements and CSIRO Manufacturing’s Nanomaterials and Devices Team to trial more advanced device configurations and performance of transparent memory ink on glass surfaces.

The $100,000 project is being jointly funded by the federal government and Strategic Elements.

Nanocube Memory Ink was invented at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) by a team led by Professor Sean Li from the school of Materials Science and Engineering.

Previously, the volume of ink produced in batches at UNSW was made for prototype production. Subsequently, Strategic Elements approached CSIRO to develop a method of creating batches of the nanocube ink on a much larger scale.

Strategic Elements operates as a registered pooled development fund (PDF) on the Australian Stock Exchange. PDF’s are venture capital funds that deliver tax concessions to shareholders to compensate for the higher risk of investing in innovative small and medium sized companies.

Strategic Elements’ commercial goal is to bring memory storage capabilities to devices and surfaces with different shapes and new flexible forms that are not currently possible with rigid silicon-based technologies.

The company has recently finished successful scale-up of production volumes of the Nanocube Memory Ink. A large-scale batch of the ink was produced with approximately 400 times the volume of previous batches.