Nanusens Granted First Patent with More in the Pipeline

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

The multi-award-winning pioneer of nanosensors, Nanusens, has had its first patent granted in the US, with filings in other countries underway, and has more patents in the process of being applied for. These all protect its innovative technology of building nanoscale structures within a standard CMOS metal layers to create novel NEMS (Nano Electro Mechanical Systems) sensors.

This first patent is for a round device with a diameter of less than 150 microns with three evenly distributed springs that are spiral so that they can be long to give high sensitivity. This design can be used by Nanusens in a number of its sensor designs such as a bone conduction sensor, motion detector and accelerometer, among others.

“You can’t simply shrink a MEMS sensor design and build it with the CMOS metal layers,” explained Dr Josep Montanyà, Founder and CEO of Nanusens. “You are going from micro structures that you can see under a microscope to nano structures that need an electron microscope. That is a whole new realm where superficial forces become much more dominant, and there is no space to build a large proof mass nor large soft springs. We have had to invent completely new sensor structures that will work reliably when made in a standard CMOS fab line, which means that they need to work with large residual stress and large process tolerances. These have taken years to perfect but now we have working NEMS in silicon so we are filing ten patent families that between them protect more than 100 inventions. Now we can safely start showing them to customers across a wide range of application areas as we have disruptively better solutions for inertial and pressure sensing, ultrasound, microphones and magnetometers, among others. Excitingly we have many more patents to file over the coming years for yet more novel sensors and applications to meet the dramatically growing market need for sensors that make devices aware and therefore smarter.” 

Dr. Graham Hines, Nanusens Chairman, added, “We held off filing so that we could do a suite of patents simultaneously as this comprehensively covers and protects our technology in one go. This is much safer than doing them one at a time as rivals could devise patent workarounds once they read each patent. That will be incredibly difficult now with our blanket protection of every aspect of our innovative nanotechnology. Patents are valuable assets for the company. Having the patents in process and working NEMS in the lab are the two milestones that investors told us that we needed to achieve in order to start our Series A funding so we have officially started that.”