TEM 411: Technical Entrepreneurship is one of the capstone classes of the TEAM curriculum. For this class, we work in groups of 3 to 4 people to develop business plans for technical product ideas that we have. The class is also open to Simon Business School students and is co-taught by Duncan Moore, vice provost for entrepreneurship and the Rudolf and Hilda Kingslake Professor in Optical Engineering, and James Senall, president of High Tech Rochester. We also have a guest lecturer present every week to discuss a different entrepreneurship topic. So far, it has been a fantastic class.
I am in a group of four people for my project. Our group consists of another TEAM student, an accounting student, an MBA student, and myself. We all have different academic and ethnic backgrounds, so it is a very diverse group! Our project is based on a technology that I worked on in the fall for TEM 440. This technology is titled “A unipolar barrier for reducing surface current leakage in semiconductor devices.” Don’t feel bad if that sounds confusing; I felt the same way when I first read up on the technology. Before I talk about how we’re trying to build a business around this technology, I should explain it in simpler terms.
Semiconductors are used in many applications, including imaging systems. The way that they work is as follows: light waves hit the semiconductor, which excites the electrons. These excited electrons produce an electric current, which for imaging systems, is run through some sort of software and converted into an image that we can make sense of on a screen. However, not all of the current created by the semiconductors is desirable, especially in very precise applications, like infrared imaging. This undesired current is called noise, or dark currents. I like to think of it as the semiconductor equivalent of radio static, which nobody wants.
The current method for reducing noise is to cool the semiconductors to 150 Kelvin, which is about -190 Fahrenheit. Given this past winter that seems pretty warm right now! The barrier that we have reduces the cooling load needed to 225 Kelvin, or -50 Fahrenheit, while providing equivalent image clarity. This reduction in cooling load makes life a lot easier for the engineers integrating a high-end imaging system into whatever it is they’re using. This is our main selling point for the technology.
We have all individually talked with a variety of companies across the globe to assess what the market interest would be for our technology and are now trying to decide the best way to move forward. We have just been assigned our coach, a local entrepreneur who will be providing us guidance as we move forward with the project. Once we decide the specific market that we’ll be targeting, we need to decide whether to license out the technology or try to produce the semiconductors ourselves. After that, we’ll begin constructing our business plan in earnest!
– Alex Magill ’14 (MS)
