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A university has earned a record-high price for the sale of a technology to a private company. Seoul National University said Thursday that it will transfer a technology for mass-producing uniform nano-particles to Hanwha Chemical Corporation for W4.3 billion (US$1=W938).
The process was developed by Prof. Hyeon Taeg-hwan of the SNU's School of Chemical Engineering and Institute of Chemical Processes
The university's Industry Foundation said that the sale is the highest ever between a college and a company. Last year all of Korea's universities together earned around W10 billion from selling technologies.
The foundation will hold a signing agreement with Hanwha at the university on Friday. Prof. Hyeon will reportedly receive a third of the money from the sale.
Prof. Hyeon developed the technology in 2004. It increases by a thousand-fold the production of para-magnetic iron oxide nano-particles, which measure one billionth of a meter, at one thousandth of the cost of the existing process.
A paper on the development of technology was published in the prestigious materials engineering journal Nature Materials.
Para-magnetic iron oxide nano-particles are a multi-purpose substance that can be used for next-generation memory chips, displays, semiconductor processing abrasives, and cancer detection sensors.
It has been impossible to commercialize the particles because until recently there was no way to mass-produce them in a uniform size.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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