Sixteen years ago a group of materials scientists and engineers from General Electric teamed up to reinvent the circuit breaker. Now, Menlo Microsystems, the spinoff that commercializes that technology, is poised to bring its revolutionary new switches to market, with huge implications for everything from 5G technologies to quantum computing.
Headquartered in Irvine, California, Menlo Micro is named after the research lab in Menlo Park, NJ, where Thomas Edison patented the first light switch in 1893, and the company's ties to GE run deep.
GE researchers spent more than a decade working internally on Menlo Micro's core technology, a new process that applies semiconductor manufacturing techniques to the manufacturing of microelectromechanical systems, before turning it into a new business five years ago.
Using a new alloy, Menlo Micro is able to reduce the size of the switches it makes to 50 microns by 50 microns, or roughly the width of a human hair. This miniaturization may allow hardware manufacturers to propose entirely new designs for a range of products that previously required much larger components.
"The microelectromechanical system we use to accomplish this ... is nothing new," said Russ Garcia, CEO of the company. "The problem was: tier one innovation is like taking a mechanical switch like light switch or relay and scaling it down to a wafer."
Many companies have tried to get MEMs to contact switches, spending hundreds of millions of dollars, but Garcia said the reliability and durability of switches has always been an issue. The material science behind Menlo's switches solves the problem, he said.
Menlo's switches pack a ton of MEMS relays on a single chip that can function as a huge mechanical relay, shrinking something the size of a fist to something the size of a microchip.
The company's founders think the potential uses are pretty limitless, thanks to the massive reduction in size and the increased durability offered by its switches.
Initial markets for marketing"One way to see this is in edge and IOT applications," said company co-founder Chris Giovanniello, former vice president of business development at GE Ventures and current senior vice president of global marketing at Menlo Micro. "What we tend to think about and what most of the industry think about is bluetooth and wifi with low power consumption and low power processing for decision making. Once you've sensed it, communicated and made a decision, you need to do something about it. "
Menlo Micro initially left GE with Giovanniello and co-founders including the chief technology officer, Chris Keimel and Jeff Baloun, senior vice president of operations. Garcia, who attended the company's initial presentation at a semiconductor conference where GE was promoting the technology, was brought on board by one of Menlo Micro's first investors, the Paladin Capital Group.
"Paul Conley of Paladin Capital sent me this deck and said "Wow, there might be something there". We met Chris and then we met with the other Chris who wanted me to help with the strategy, "Garcia said. He ended up coming on board as a founding executive.
Current solid-state technologies tasked with making something happen based on data currently use more power than the rest of the systems they're tied to. Menlo Micro's chips will substantially reduce power loss and improve the efficiency of entire systems, he said.
"If you think about the light switch in your house, it's two metal contacts that come together. If that contact is really good and clean, the electricity flows very efficiently and when you turn it off ... no electricity can flow through and [nothing] it happens at all, "said Garcia, a longtime executive in the MEMS industry." In a semiconductor, there is a loss in that contact. When you run a transistor on it it allows energy to flow through but it loses some of that energy into heat and when you turn it off it allows some of that energy to flow through. When you take the billions of switches ... all that incremental energy is completely lost. "
The advantages of the technology translate into a demand from the defense industry, which wants to install the new switches in radar, radio and satellite networks. Commercial applications include wi-fi connectivity, 5G cellular networks, radio frequency and microwave switching. Consumers may be seeing switches in cell phones, which means fewer dropped calls, higher data speeds and capacities, and longer battery life.
Menlo has already sent samples from its production line to 30 leading customers in the aerospace and defense, telecommunications, warhead and measurement industries. And the company has raised $ 44 million in new funding from investors including Future Shape Group, Nest founder Tony Fadell, to increase its manufacturing capacity and meet potential demand.
"The concept of an 'ideal switch' was theoretical - something that companies have worked for decades - right up to Menlo Micro," said Marianne Wu, former GE Ventures chief and current CEO of 40 North Ventures, who led Menlo Micro's last round. "We are incredibly excited to be working with such a dynamic and experienced team on a core technology that is revolutionizing almost every industry."
Thinking beyond 5G, defense and industrial IOTIn the past 30 months, Menlo Micro has said it has completed the transfer and qualification of its production process, moving from a 4-inch research facility to a new 8-inch high-volume production line.
This means that the company is able to increase the production of its initial products and increase its capacity. With the qualification in hand, the company plans to scale production to over 100,000 units per month by the end of 2020 and reach the production capacity of millions of switches per month in 2021.
So besides telecommunications and defense, there are target markets in energy storage, automotive and aerospace due to miniaturization, while quantum computing companies are interested in the technology due to its durability.
"The relay is a great mechanical device that you can hold in your hand and used in many applications to turn the power on and off that goes to an industrial equipment for your car to the engines that need to be driven," Giovanniello said. "They are very difficult to integrate because they are so big. We can take the electrical characteristics of having real metal to metal on a low loss connection and then when it is open there is an air gap through which no current can flow. .. We can integrate [the switches] in completely different architectures. "
Ultimately, Giovanniello said the go-to-market strategy is to focus on the "99 rule".
"We are able to reduce the size, weight and power of the box [the switch] is entering up to 99%. This is a huge improvement in infrastructure and costs, "he said.
For companies developing quantum computers, the value proposition isn't just about the size of the MEMS, but the durability of the alloy that Menlo Micro has developed. "As for quantum, you have to have devices that work near absolute zero ... Semiconductors don't work up to those temperatures, so they use old-fashioned mechanical relays. [which] it can take hours to get back to temperature, "Giovanniello said." Our materials are so robust that they work [at temperatures] down to a few millikelvins. "
It is this flexibility and the potential redesign of old industrial technologies that have not been updated for nearly a century that has enabled the company to raise $ 78 million in funding from investors including Piva, Paladin Capital Group, Vertical Venture Partners, Future Shape and strategic investors such as Corning and Microsemi.
"For over 40 years, the industry has been looking for a switch that has the perfect combination of the electromechanical relay and the silicon transistor," Tony Fadell said in a statement. "[This technology] I a tiny, efficient and reliable micro-mechanical switch with unmatched RF performance and counterintuitively high power handling of 1,000 watts. As our world moves towards electrification and the wireless of everything, Menlo Micro's profound innovation is already triggering a huge cross-industry upheaval. "
