In California, Picarro Inc. of Sunnyvale and Stanford University have agreed to extend an exclusive licensing agreement on Stanford patents for a minimum of five years. The patents, eight issued and five pending, cover the sensing technology behind a method for detecting and quantifying trace amounts of chemicals. This cavity ringdown spectroscopy technique was developed by Stanford and commercialized by Picarro for a growing number of applications. Picarro, which has incorporated the technology into its ESP-1000 trace gas detectors, provides photonic products for life sciences, environmental monitoring and industrial process control.