November 5, 2007 (Huntsville, Alabama). It was announced today that Thomas A. Cellucci, Ph.D., MBA was recently elected to the CALMEC Board of Directors. Dr. Jon Leonard, Chairman of CALMEC commented: “We’re delighted to welcome Tom to our Board. His demonstrated skills and significant experience will help establish CALMEC as leader in molecular electronics.”

Cellucci recently accepted in July 2007 a special five-year appointment from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as its Chief Commercialization Officer in the Science and Technology Directorate, responsible for the cost-effective and efficient development of new products and services for DHS. As a result of his consistent achievement in the commercialization of emerging technologies, Cellucci has received numerous awards and citations from industry, government and business. In addition, he has significant experience interacting with high ranking members of the United States government—including the White House, US Senate and US House of Representatives—having provided executive briefs to the President of the United States and ranking members of Congress.

Cellucci is a serial entrepreneur with extensive expertise and experience in the commercialization of technology and rapid time-to-market new product development. As Founder, Chairman and CEO of Cellucci Associates, Inc. (CAI), a highly successful management consulting firm he founded in 1999 with headquarters in Wellesley, Massachusetts (http://www.cellucciassociates.com), he possesses the well-deserved reputation as a “strategist that EXECUTES”. CAI raises capital and provides strategic business services to global high-technology firms.

Dr. Cellucci is a seasoned senior executive, most recently credited with transitioning Zyvex Corporation, as its President, from a nanotech technology-push to market-driven enterprise—growing sales from virtually zero at the end of 2001 to over $10 million in 2005. Profitably growing firms has been his trademark. He also serves on several Boards, such as Edmund Industrial Optics and many others and has authored or co-authored well over 117 articles on nanotechnology, laser physics, photonics, environmental disturbance control, MEMS test and measurement and high-technology sales and marketing. As a result of his consistent achievement in the commercialization of emerging technologies, Cellucci has received numerous awards and citations from industry, government and business. In addition, he regularly interacts with high ranking members of the United States government—including the White House, US Senate and House of Representatives. He is often asked to serve as keynote speaker at both business and technical events around the world.

Cellucci holds a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania, an MBA from Rutgers University in Strategic Management and Marketing and a BS in Chemistry from Fordham University. In addition, he has completed several senior executive special courses at institutions such as Harvard Business School, MIT Sloan School of Business and Kellogg School of Management.

Excerpts from an interview conducted by Nanomagazine.com in May 2002 of James J. Marek, Jr., CALMEC President and Chief Executive Officer, on nanotechnology and molecular electronics.

Nanomagazine: Tell us about yourself. What is your background and what is your current occupation?

Marek: After graduating from Marquette University in 1966 with a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering degree, I joined the Bell System, specifically Western Electric and Bell Telephone Laboratories, as a very green, but very eager, design engineer. I was fortunate to always be in smaller organizations that had a more entrepreneur-like attitude with very high visibility so I was able to progress from engineering into product consulting, product management, and project management.  While a Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories, I received patent recognition for certain circuit designs.

Over the years, job demands permitting, I was able to sneak in some postgraduate work in communications, marketing, finance, accounting, and business administration at the University of Colorado in Denver, the Western Electric Corporate Education Center, and the American Management Association. I left the Bell System in 1980 to expand my base of experience.

I have worked for various high technology companies gaining experience in product management, manufacturing, operations, sales, marketing (domestic and international), finance, human resources, customer service, legal, staff development, and general management. I have held the positions of Director of Product Management and Marketing, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, General Manager, President, CEO, Corporate Treasurer, and Corporate Secretary.

It has been my privilege to serve on the Board of Directors of two companies and my pleasure to have had the invigorating experience of running my own, successful consulting business where I specialized in offering services in startup company management, turnaround restructuring, sales and marketing management, and contract negotiations.

In July of 1997, I was happily going about the business of running my consulting practice when Jon Leonard, cofounder of CALMEC along with Robert R. Schumaker, called to tell me about an opportunity that he thought I couldn’t refuse. He described a situation demanding 150% of my time and effort all with the potential of maybe someday receiving compensation. He was right. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to participate in this exciting new field. I closed my consulting business and joined CALMEC in September of that year as its President & CEO.

Nanomagazine: Tell us about CALMEC. What is the company’s current focus?

Marek: California Molecular Electronics Corporation is a for-profit C corporation formed in 1997 for the purpose of commercially advancing the field of molecular electronics. Our interests and focus lie solely in the field of molecular electronics and the associated technologies. We develop molecular electronic technologies and products as well as license key technologies developed by others. In turn, these molecular electronics technologies are licensed to, and form the basis for, joint venture activities with industrial customers/partners from the semiconductor, computer, imaging, and chemical industries. The aim of these joint venture activities is to create advanced products based on molecular electronics. Our strategy is to promote our technology on a first-come-first-serve, limited time, exclusive basis providing our strategic partners both market and technology domination in their field-of-use.

The Company is headquartered in San Jose California where we have laboratory facilities and where we employ a staff of Ph.D. level scientists who are developing molecular technologies and architectures.

Among our technologies is a molecule that we have engineered, and own patents to, that exhibits classical switching properties. This molecule, which we refer to and have trademarked as the Chiropticene molecule, switches back and forth on command with the application of light and an electric field from one stable and distinct state to another and, like an electronic logic switch, can be read as a binary “1” or “0”, “on” or “off”, etc.

Make no mistake about it. This is a business not a religious experience. We are dedicated to the advancement and commercialization of the field of molecular electronics for profit.

Nanomagazine: Tell us about the Chiropticene switch. Does it exhibit high gain? Is it robust and reliable enough to be used in mainstream computing applications?

Marek: Chiropticene is our flagship technology. It is a single molecule that exhibits classical switching properties. The Chiropticene switch is significantly smaller than existing, as well as projected, semiconductor switches with much more powerful processing capabilities, much lower power requirements, and appreciably lower production costs. Preliminary analyses attest to its robustness and reliability.

We have developed two architectural concepts for applications that utilize the Chiropticene molecule as the key, central element. The first architecture gives us a new, three-dimensional memory device to replace hard disks, flash memory chips, and computer mass storage media. The second architecture yields a switching device that will serve as a replacement for existing telecommunications switches and routers providing an all-optical solution for today’s fiber optic networks.

Initially, even with a bit size defined as one micron, the Chiropticene three-dimensional molecular memory device architecture will yield a capacity of 16 terabits of data in a device the size of a cubic inch. That’s approximately 2 trillion bytes of data. Today’s current generation of personal computers is typically equipped with as much as 60 gigabytes of hard drive memory. This architecture provides 34 times more memory in just a cubic inch. Even greater capacities will be achievable in the future as supporting laser and optical detection technologies advance. The write/read characteristics of the three-dimensional memory device are equally impressive because the architecture lends itself to massively parallel writing and reading of data. It is initially capable of reading one million bits of data per read operation with up to 2,000 reads per second for a write/read rate of two gigabits per second.

Neither of these initial applications requires that the Chiropticene switch exhibit gain. However, with the flexibility of the molecule’s architecture and our ability to manipulate the current structure of the molecule to meet whatever characteristics are necessary, we believe that a derivative of the molecule can be developed to achieve computational circuits using an all-optical approach.

Nanomagazine: Does CALMEC have a plan to mass-produce Chiropticene molecules? Do you have a concept as to how to connect these devices?

Marek: Our business plan calls for us to develop our technologies to proof-of-concept and/or prototype stage and then to license them to others (i.e., our strategic partners) for commercialization in specific fields-of-use. With respect to the Chiropticene technology, even though we license the use of the technology to these strategic partners, we plan to produce, either within our own facilities or through a contract manufacturing arrangement, and be the sole supplier of the unique Chiropticene molecular material.

The nice thing about the Chiropticene molecule is that it is an optic molecule – controlled with light and a potential. No physical interconnection is required to switch or read it (i.e., no wires are required). Likewise, the beauty of the two architectures that we have picked initially for the Chiropticene technology, namely the molecular memory device and the optical router/switch, do not require that the molecules/switches be interconnected. As you know, one of the obstacles facing the development of logic gates using molecular sized devices is the ability to interconnect them to achieve logic arrays. Much research is being conducted in this area. For example, the Lieber Group at Harvard proposes using bucky tubes as wires, which I believe shows promise. However, there is no clear answer on how molecular wires can be accomplished today. Will research get there? Sure, but not in the near term. Our architectures avoid this, which is why we can project the availability of a three-dimensional prototype of the Chiropticene molecular memory device in the two to three year time frame.

Nanomagazine: Many electrical engineers argue that future microprocessors will be hybrid chips composed of silicon logic gates and molecular memory. Intel researchers have argued that silicon will always be at the core of chips because of the gain problem. How accurate is this prediction?

Marek: Silicon has brought us a long way. I believe that with some tweaking and innovative research it will be able to take us a little farther. But the laws of physics dictate that it cannot continue to satisfy the need for the long term and that something else must come along. We believe that molecular electronics will be the answer. Although molecular electronics has the potential to cause a revolutionary change in the electronics world, it will more likely be evolutionary in nature due to various economic and social factors. We will begin to see hybrid circuits, circuits containing both silicon-based devices and molecular-based devices, within the five-year time frame. Eventually, it will be all molecular. What will be the driving force that brings a molecular-based device into the picture? The inability of silicon-based devices to meet specific applications.

In order to displace silicon-based chips in the existing architecture of the logic gate arrays of today, a molecular device must be developed that exhibits gain. There is a great deal of research going on in this area with some rather dramatic, promising, preliminary results so I feel confident that a molecular device will be developed that provides gain and that molecular wires will be developed allowing for them to be interconnected. However, as I mentioned before, an alternative to this would be an all-optic computational circuit approach.

Nanomagazine: How long do you believe that conventional CMOS scaling will continue? If the ITRS roadmap is accurate, will CMOS circuitry be able to effectively compete with molecular circuitry (such as Chiropticene molecules) in terms of speed, density, and power consumption?

Marek: I think you’ve touched on a very important point here. The primary competition is not among molecular electronics companies like us. The primary competition is the existing technology that our molecular electronics technologies aim to replace.

Existing technology is the main competition because it is already entrenched in our potential customers' businesses and because it is being continuously advanced. Our customers are high tech businesses for whom the aggressive advancement of technology is a way of life. Their R&D departments are large, staffed with top people, and well funded. They are focused on the improvement of their technology.

The result is that existing technologies, particularly in the fields of interest to CALMEC, are continuously improving. Unless our technology is significantly better than existing technologies, or unless our technology brings capabilities that are impossible with existing technologies, our customers will be hesitant to make investments in the commercialization of what we bring. How we compete is really a function of just how our technologies compare to these technologies not only with their capabilities today but also with their perceived future capabilities. Fortunately, our Chiropticene-based technologies do promise to be significantly better than existing technologies in areas important to our customers and it also brings certain valuable features that are impossible with existing technologies. We can provide higher capacities, we’re all optical, no moving parts, lower power consumption, appreciably lower production costs, opportunity for technological dominance in their world markets, potential for higher profit margins, etc.

Nanomagazine: How does the Chiropticene switch compare to other molecular electronics proposals, such as Eric Drexler’s Rod Logic, Ralph Merkle’s helical logic, or quantum dots?

Marek: The Chiropticene technology is a near term molecular technology. By that I mean it is a technology that allows for useful, realizable near-term applications that are logically compatible with today’s processing infrastructure. Most other approaches, although very interesting, can only be accomplished in the longer term and would require a massive change with respect to operating systems, applications software, etc. In fact, in many cases, it would require completely scrapping all operating systems, applications software, and system architectures and starting over from scratch. Our Chiropticene molecular memory device on the other hand could slip easily into one of today’s computers with only minimal changes to the operating system. CALMEC focuses on technologies that bring molecular electronics into the near term. That’s why you see the tag lines “The Applications Company” and “Making Molecular Electronics Real” used with our name and logo.

Nanomagazine: It would seem that Chiropticene switches could have uses in the compute-intensive fields of Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Virtual Reality, to name a few. Do you think that Chiropticene has the potential to create entire new industries?

Marek: I think molecular electronics has the potential to create entire new industries and that our Chiropticene technology will play a major role. The applications for the Chiropticene technology are many and varied. In addition to those that you mentioned, it lends itself to realizable architectures for molecular computers; super high resolution, low cost displays; imaging; memory/data storage; and optical routers/switches such as that needed for today’s fiber optic networks. Our interest in the molecular memory device and the molecular router/switch as the initial applications is based on the projected growth needs of their respective markets (e.g., the memory markets are projected to grow from $83B to $132B by 2004) and the predicted inability of current technologies to continue to support these needs.

Nanomagazine: How receptive are the electrical engineering and chemistry communities to CALMEC’s activities? How receptive is the investment community to CALMEC’s philosophy?

Marek: I have yet to find a technical discipline that is not receptive to our activities, especially those that are doing research in the field of molecular electronics. As I said previously, not only do we internally develop molecular technologies but we also license technologies from others. These researchers along with their universities or companies like the concept of investing their technologies in CALMEC. They welcome the opportunity to participate in, and benefit from, the growth of the molecular electronics industry and for their technologies to have the chance to actually become something other than an academic curiosity.

The investment community is mixed. Some appreciate the nuances of an emerging field such as molecular electronics and buy into what it will take to be successful. Others fall into the trap of trying to get the molecular electronics industry to conform to the profiles used for other industries, which I believe is a mistake and could lead to the situation as experienced with dot.com companies.

Nanomagazine: Some in the molecular nanotechnology field are worried that the industry may go through a shakeout within the next decade, similar to the shakeout that occurred recently with the dot.com companies. These people fear that the nanotech companies won’t be able to meet investors’ short-term expectations. Are you at all concerned about a potential backlash?

Marek: There will inevitably be shakeouts. There is in any new, emerging industry. I don’t believe it will be as devastating as what occurred in the dot.com industry because molecular nanotechnology has a stable, realistic foundation to build upon with realizable, attainable profit potentials. It’s not like the dot.com industry that was created largely with mirrors with no realistic revenue-producing expectations and targeted for investors looking to turn a quick profit. Companies that have sound, attainable business plans with good, commercializable technologies will succeed. Yes, having patient investors is a key factor. But if you are upfront with your investors as to the time frames involved, it’s not a problem.

I would like to add that it’s important to realize that the shakeout potential will not just be limited to the new molecular electronics companies. Existing, established, major companies also face the possibility of being left behind. I believe we will see a shakeout there as well.  Some will be astute enough to retool to the molecular electronics technologies and adapt their businesses. Some will cling to the old ways and technologies and make the best buggy whip possible. They will lose and pass on. The companies that do adapt to the changes being spawned by nanotechnology will survive and be joined by a whole host of new, technologically advanced players.

Nanomagazine: Most of the major branches of science – including medicine, biology, microbiology, and chemistry, are “going molecular”. These fields are being transformed by new capabilities to observe and manipulate matter at the atomic level. How far do you believe these trends will go? Will we ever have molecular manufacturing?

Marek: I think all the interest in, and speculation for, nano-based technologies is great. Although CALMEC is currently not active in the branches of science you mentioned, namely medicine, biology, and microbiology, and I am certainly not an expert in any of them, I applaud their work and efforts and believe that the types of capabilities they are projecting are realizable and very valuable. Of course, there are those who declare that we are playing with fire and that the technologies being developed are unnatural and therefore “evil”. But we need to remind ourselves that technology in and of itself is neither good nor evil, it’s how it is applied that makes it one or the other.

Nanomagazine: What are your plans for the future?

Marek: Personally, like all of us in CALMEC, I am going to spend every waking minute seeing to the success of the Company, and I don’t need much sleep. We have some great investors in the Company that share the Company’s vision of the future and enthusiasm in the feasibility and inevitability of molecular electronics. They deserve nothing less.

From the Company’s perspective, our business plan calls for us, along with the continued development of our molecular technologies, to establish the strategic partnerships for the purpose of commercializing the technologies that we have in our portfolio.