South Park Silicon Valley

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

By Sam Petri

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-Ski towns are full of transient young people. Ask most bartenders in Lake Tahoe, Calif., or Summit County, Colo., and you’ll learn they’re taking a few years off in between college and grad school before they get “serious.” Or maybe they haven’t gone to school yet and are saving up money so they can get “serious” somewhere else. Either way you slice it, their minds are in another place, and they know they will leave town shortly.  
Jackson Hole is a bit different. Everyone who lands here wants to stay here and will do so by any means necessary, even if that means mowing lawns with a PhD under their cap. This town has more Masters and Doctors waiting tables and pulling pints than any of the bars just off the MIT campus. 

But that could be changing. In the past few years the availability of grant funding has allowed the technology sector to flourish all over Wyoming. If things keep going in this direction, perhaps Jackson Hole will change from a service industry-dominated vacationland that employs overqualified people, to a place where one’s college education can actually be put to use. Here are a few companies headquartered right down the street that are changing the world.

ALCES TECHNOLOGY
At the 2005 Worlds Fair in Aichi, Japan, Sony projected the largest displayed image to date using three groups of projectors stacked four high to make a 50-by-10-meter image. That’s a 2,005-diagonal-inch TV. The high definition image contained 6 million pixels and was on display for six months. For the project, Sony licensed technology that Jackson Hole resident David Bloom had developed while on staff at Stanford University in the ’90s.

Since the mid ’80s, Bloom founded six companies, five of which were in the Silicon Valley, three of which are now publicly traded. He has over 50 patents, the two most recent being the “artificial synapse chip” and the “differential interferometric light modulator and image display device.” He has published more than 120 journal articles and book contributions. In the winter of 1998, he took a break from his work, bought a season pass to Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, and decided he had no reason to move back to the Bay Area.

Today, Bloom is bubbling with excitement. He has developed a single high definition projector that produces a 20 million-pixel (20 megapixel) image in what he calls Quad HD, four times the high definition most of us have experienced. 

Bloom runs Alces Technology Inc. (the name means “moose” in Latin, in case you were wondering), a company he started in his barn in 2003. You’ve been a stones throw away from Alces if you’ve ever been by the offices of Lower Valley Energy. But inside Alces’ headquarters, in one of the tin buildings that dominate that stretch of Highway 89, a handful of people are pushing the limits of light projection by using nanotechnology.  
Their 20 megapixel projector, used by the Air Force and a handful of well-heeled planetariums, uses a micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) -based grating light modulator (GLM) to “paint” a high-definition image on the screen in front of you using red, green and blue lasers.

“We create a two-dimensional image much in the same way an inkjet printer works,” said Bloom. “With inkjet printers you have a linear array of nozzles, but as it moves across the paper it creates a two dimensional image. We do that with light. We use 4,096 pixels at 60 times a second — this scan mirror paints it across the screen. It sweeps across the screen, it paints the two-dimensional image.”

Imagine a single column of light 4,096 pixels high constantly changing on the vertical axis. Then imagine that column shot onto a mirror that is sweeping rapidly back and forth on the horizontal axis, thus painting images before your eyes.  Up and down, side to side, the column of 4,096 pixels scans to create a 4,096-by-5,120-pixel image, or a picture made up of 20,971,520 pixels.

“There are 24 gigabits per second of data driving each color, so roughly 75 gigabits of data per second,” said Bloom. The red, green and blue lasers used each provide 10 watts of light, which creates a display bright enough to be projected onto large screens. At the moment, the projector takes 16 personal computers to handle the image processing chores for the display. In other words, for you gamers out there, “It takes 16 top end video graphic cards to drive this display,” said Bloom.

The future of all this, aside from flight simulators and planetariums, could be compact projectors using this same technology. Alces also has a concept for a 32 million-pixel display projector about the size of a phone book. It would be highly portable and allow you to share information in rapid fashion to, say, a platoon of troops.

“We think this is possible, and we’re working in that direction,” said Bloom.  
The company’s close ties with Sony could lead to deals where this technology is produced on a large scale for home entertainment or commercial use.

DECISIVE DIAGNOSTICS
Decisive Diagnostics didn’t exist until last week. Since 1996, three different biological testing companies have existed under the roof where DD now operates. They are the fourth.

Andrew Firmin has worked for each company since he got a job as a lab tech over 10 years ago, when N2 Research operated there. He is now the managing scientific director for DD. That means he runs the company. Before Decisive Diagnostics, Stratagene, a worldwide development and supply company for the life science market, operated a research and development office there. Stratagene no longer operates in Jackson Hole, as ex-CEO Joe Sorge sold off his shares, but he managed to keep the Jackson facility in operation under a new start-up company name, Decisive Diagnostics. 

“We’re doing the same work as we did at Stratagene, which is new technology development for human diagnostic testing,” said Firmin.

The technology developed at Decisive Diagnostics will help diagnose diseases faster – in a matter of hours as opposed to days – and will help identify what type of treatment is right for the individual patient. DD also is working to tailor-fitting drugs to treat patients based on their genetic make up, because certain variations in your genetic material will determine how you respond to drugs.

DD works with a general technology called Quantitative Polymerase Chain Reaction (qPCR) that is basically like a DNA copy machine. They run tests on DNA and watch it react in one of five thermal cyclers. The thermal cyclers look like toaster ovens, but they read complex chemical reactions and send that information to a computer screen to be graphed in real time. 

“PCR has been around for a long time, but the quantitative part is newer,” said Firmin, “It’s also called real time PCR, so you can detect the production of a particular fragment of DNA in real time with a florescent dye.”

This would help you identify why cancer cells are developing in a specific area of a patient’s body, or detect HIV, among other applications. DD develops novel techniques based around existing technology and applies those strategies to make things easier, more efficient or faster in the world of molecular biology.

“We have the technology, sold with the equipment, sold with the kit. It’s all together and sold to a clinical laboratory or a testing lab,” said Firmin. “Quest Diagnostics or somebody huge would buy this whole unit, and then they would run whatever assays we developed. If you want to test for HIV or Hepatitis C or bacteria or whatever it is, we would take our novel technology, apply it to that specific target, develop the test, tech that target to whatever specifications are needed, and then sell that kit to the testing facility.”

It seems odd that molecular biology work is going on just down the road from Jackson Hole’s recycling plant, but Firmin contends all you need is the Internet, FedEx and smart people to run any business anywhere. Here in Teton County, we have a stockpile of college graduates, most of whom are reluctantly banging nails, slinging burgers or selling retail to survive. 

“The funding, the grant money, is pretty good right now,” said Firmin of Wyoming’s Small Business Innovative Research and Technology Transfer Programs, facilitated by the University of Wyoming. Essentially, there is plenty of grant money available for people who want to develop research and technology businesses.

“The whole Imagine Jackson thing, I know it got a lot of heat, but I think it’s a great idea because, if it does what it should, it will help companies grow, it brings more jobs into town, high paying technical jobs,” Firman said. “I hope it continues to grow and helps diversify the community.”

SQUARE ONE TECHNOLOGIES
On the corner of South Park Drive and Highway 89, Robert Viola’s Square One Technologies occupies an unassuming brown building that looks like a residential home.
When I swung through, Viola wasn’t there. For the past week, he’s been on the East Coast meeting with the U.S. Navy about the way he and his company have applied a robotic arm technology system to demilitarize obsolete weapons.

Although he’s not in the office-lab, his local crew of mechanical engineers continues to play with robots in the garage, the hum of Bob Dylan’s harmonica swaying in the background. They are simulating the same process Viola is trying to sell to the Navy.

A large inert, conventional bomb provided by the Navy sits in a cradle in the garage. Native Jacksonite and mechanical engineer Ryan Talermo is running a program that unscrews the tip of the bomb so humans won’t have to do this type of dangerous, repetitive labor when demilitarizing the thousands of out-of-date weapons that are in this country.

“We buy the robotic arms and their software, and then we develop the application to use them,” explained Control Engineer Peter Carman. “Most of our products involve sample handling, but some involve precision positioning.”

Aside from disassembling bombs, Square One has developed a system that harvests microscopic crystals and places them into an X-ray beam for medical drug research. They have used this same application to place microscopic matter into a neutron beam. Because neutron beams give off an intense amount of radiation, humans don’t want to be around them, and because it is difficult for a human to handle something microscopic, it’s better left to a precise robot.

“One of the processes of drug development is to grow the proteins and then try to characterize them,” Carmen said. “This means figuring out how the amino acids link together to see what their shape is, and one of the ways they can see that is with X-rays.”

Proteins don’t typically crystallize, Carmen said, so there is a whole art to that in itself. Then they are mounted on a pin to be examined. “You can’t see these things,” he said. After being cooled with liquid nitrogen, they are put into and X-ray beam. “By the time they get around to X-raying them, they’ve invested a lot of money in these crystals, up to a half million dollars,” Carman said.. Handling them sounds like something better left to a robot, but right now, humans are mostly managing these costly, fragile crystals by hand. 

The robotic arms have various “tools” or hands that it can pick up to perform different tasks. Square One designs these tools for the robotic arm and then has them manufactured at Drew Gillingwater’s machine shop, called GH20, just down the street.
“That machine shop is crucial to this operation,” said Carman. “It’s import for us to have something like that here so we can go over and get that stuff.”
And it’s in this localized sense that Square One runs it’s operations. 

“There are so many super-talented, well-educated college graduates in the valley,” Bob Viola said over the phone. “You’ve got a huge pool of people to choose from. These people are risk takers, they’re unconventional people. If they weren’t, they would have stayed in Cleveland.” 

Viola employs mechanical engineers like Jace Walsh and Ryan Talermo because they are skilled and have chosen to stay in Jackson Hole, there home town. Without a company like Square One, these two would be likely to move away.

“I got tired of landscaping,” quipped Talermo. After Walsh graduated from Michigan Technical University, he never thought he’d be back in Jackson. “I thought I’d wind up in Denver if I was lucky,” Walsh said.

Photo by Derek DiLuzio
David Bloom is founder of Alces Technology, headquartered here in Jacksn Hole.

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