In September 2008 Royston-based Dolomite Ltd, one of this Newsletter’s favoured firms, announced that they have now ‘optimised the fabrication of quartz microfluidic chips’, enabling instrument manufacturers to benefit from the many important qualities of synthetic quartz for use within bioscience and medical systems.

Their ‘lab on a chip’ technology mixes science and engineering to enable very small-scale fluid control and analysis, allowing instrument manufacturers to develop smaller, more cost-effective and more powerful systems.

With lab-on-a-chip technology, entire complex chemical management and analysis systems are created in a microfluidic chip and interfaced with, for example, electronic and optical detection systems.

Dolomite is a leader in this field and won £2m funding from the Department of Trade and Industry’s Micro and Nano Technology (MNT) Manufacturing Initiative; this allowed Dolomite to establish excellent microfabrication facilities that include cleanrooms, precision glass processing facilities and applications laboratories.

“The standard material for this technology tends to be glass,” said Dolomite’s Gillian Davis. The advantages of quartz for microfluidics are due to the facts that it is hard, chemically inert, UV transparent, non-auto-fluorescent and non-porous - making it a preferred material for applications in the bioscience sector. However, much of the challenge of the microfluidic device fabrication in this material comes from the fact that quartz is much harder than glass. Engineers at Dolomite have been working for the past year to optimize the fabrication of quartz devices and they can now etch features with depths of up to 150microns. This is far deeper than most alternative solutions on the market that can only offer depths in the region of 20microns. The etching process optimized by Dolomite ensures that the channels are optically smooth.

“The main issue is that etch times with quartz are very long,” said Gillian Davis. “We have made several important breakthroughs in the manufacturing process that have helped us optimize the process, it is now realistic for us to get depths of 50microns in regular production and maybe a maximum of 150microns for very specific projects.”

In addition to this, Dolomite has managed to attract top quality engineering and scientific staff with strong backgrounds across the broad range of disciplines required for success in bringing microfluidics applications to the market, including chemistry, biotechnology, control system development, electronics, physics and instrument design and supply.

www.dolomite-microfluidics.com – 01763 242 491.

Bristol-based Gnodal, which is developing a revolutionary technology for use in high performance data centres, has won finance from the YFM Group-managed South West Ventures Fund as part of a £1.1 million funding round. Adrian Beecroft and NESTA were co-investors in the round.

Gnodal, located in the SETSquared business incubator at Bristol University, has developed technology that gives an order of magnitude improvement in data centre performance and power efficiency.

With rapidly increasing volumes of information, data centres are growing in size and power consumption. Traditional technologies have become inefficient as data centres have increased in size.

At present, these problems principally affect the very largest users of high performance computing facilities, but are increasingly experienced in enterprise and Internet data centres. With the advent of virtualisation, web 2.0 and sophisticated corporate applications, this is becoming more of an issue.

The Gnodal solution, offering a unique combination of high performance, low cost and low power, enables the construction of even larger scale data centres and higher performance computing systems. The market research company Dell ‘Oro predicts that in 2011 Gnodal’s addressable market will be worth $4.8 billion.

Fred Homewood, CEO of Gnodal, said: “Our products will offer performance levels significantly exceeding those found today in large data centres. We will be offering a range of products to satisfy the smallest systems to the largest server clusters and storage arrays.

www.gnodal.co.uk

Wales has established a network of sector-targeted technology centres, named Technium, across the county, and they now organize an annual competition for resident companies.

The overall winner of the 2007-2008 Technium Challenge UK competition, Yamgo. It was chosen at the Technium Annual Awards Dinner that recognised the success of companies based at the Technium incubator centres, based across Wales.

The finalises were Aeristech Ltd and Oncomorph Analysis Ltd, Hazard Research and Risk Consultants HazRes Ltd (Technium Aberystwyth), the Social Responsibility Award - S8080 Ltd (Technium Swansea); Fast Growth Award to ETL Solutions Ltd (Technium CAST), and the Special Achievement Award went to Rockfield Software Ltd, also based at (Technium Swansea).

www.wda.co.uk