CU tech spinout PowerSicel building silicon chips

BOULDER — When you think of silicon chips you naturally think of the traffic, sky-high rents and geeky millionaires of California’s Silicon Valley. But PowerSicel Inc. is making silicon chips right here in Boulder Valley.

The company is a product of technology transfer, spun out of electrical engineering Professor Bart Van Zeghbroeck’s lab at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2001.

Silicon chips are the building blocks of semiconductors, which are used to make diodes, transistors and other basic “solid state” electronic components. Semiconductors can be made from any crystalline material that allows electrical current to flow through it — typically silicon or gallium arsenide.

The PowerSicel difference is using silicon carbide instead of ordinary silicon. Silicon carbide has material properties superior to either silicon or gallium arsenide, according to Van Zeghbroeck,

PowerSicel chief technical officer. The properties include the ability to operate at higher voltages and higher power densities. The advantages, therefore, are better performance at lower cost.

In September PowerSicel raised $2.5 million in series A financing. Greenwich, Conn.-based Digital

Power Capital LLC led the round with participation from Denver-based ITU Ventures. The company had accepted a seed round in November 2001 from ITU. Although Van Zeghbroeck would not disclose the amount, he said “We tried to take as little as possible to get us through the initial phase.”

Van Zeghbroeck hopes the cash influx will keep the eight-employee company going for two years as it develops the technology and finds potential customers. “The plan is by that time is to have a product and a customer,” he said, so the company could proceed with series B funding “with the intent of manufacturing.” Potential customers include broadcasting, avionics, radar and wireless communications carriers.

The company is located in east Boulder in a building previously occupied by Research Electro-Optics Inc., which has a 5,000-square-foot clean room appropriate for producing semiconductor chips. It’s not equipped for full-fledged manufacturing, but PowerSicel is building chips one by one as it perfects the process.

The company got its start when Van Zeghbroeck took a leave of absence in fall 2001 to think about commercializing products from his lab. He got together with John Torvik to identify the intellectual property on which they could build a company. Torvik, PowerSicel’s president, was formerly vice president of new products at Boulder-based Astralux Inc.

The next step was to license the intellectual property from the university. “The hardest part was identifying the value of the IP. Everybody has their own opinion,” Van Zeghbroeck said. “At that point it was just a disclosure, not a patent. Therefore we had a lot of discussions about the real value and how the university would be compensated.”

Although he wouldn’t say what the final outcome was, Van Zeghbroeck said the licensing agreement included a bit of cash up front, a minimal license fee, royalties and some equity in PowerSicel.

Right now the company is setting up a pilot line that demonstrates its production capabilities.

And it’s likely production will remain in the United States even when manufacturing in earnest begins, Van Zeghbroeck said. But since packaging is labor intensive, it probably will be sent offshore like most semiconductor manufacturers do, he continued.

Van Zeghbroeck envisions profitability in three or four years, “but I hope no one will hold me to it,” he said.

Van Zeghbroeck is in his third year of leave from CU and doesn’t know what the future will bring in terms of balancing his careers in academics and industry. He hasn’t had to teach any classes, but still advises a few graduate students. “Right now I’m focused on getting this technology out,” he said. “Once it gets to be manufacturing, that’s not what I’ve done in the past. But with a high-tech company there’s still a lot of development to do.”

The migration from lab-based science to commercialization was simpler than most technology transfer projects, said Ken Porter, director of the CU-Boulder campus Technology Transfer Office “because Bart and John did most of it themselves.” Typically, he works with professors who might have an idea for a company but no idea how to get started. His office provides them with services ranging from education about the technology transfer process to feasibility studies and intellectual property strategies.

Contact Caron Schwartz Ellis at (303) 440-4950 or e-mail csellis@bcbr.com.

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