—San Diego’s Active Network (NYSE ACTV), which provides online event registration and related services, acquired Philadelphia-based StarCite for about $51 million in stock and cash. StarCite, which provides Web-based event management services for companies around the world, has about 300 employees. The Active Network said StarCite will become part of its newly launched “Business Solutions” division, which will serve the events industry.

—San Diego-based Accelrys (NASDAQ: ACCL), which provides scientific enterprise research and development software and services, said it’s paying $35 million to acquire VelQuest, a Boston-area developer of systems that support good manufacturing practices for FDA-regulated industries. Accelrys said the VelQuest acquisition would expand its product line to include software used in pharmaceutical quality assurance and quality control.

—San Diego’s Entropic Communications (NASDAQ: ENTR), which specializes in Multimedia over Coax (MoCA) technology used in home entertainment systems, said it wants to purchase certain assets of Trident Microsystems’ set-top box and system-on-a-chip business. Entropic submitted its $55 million offer as part of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization that Sunnyvale, CA-based Trident filed last Wednesday. The bankruptcy court in Delaware must approve the Entropic offer, which could happen by the end of March if no other bidders step forward.

—Qualcomm Chairman and CEO Paul Jacobs is set to deliver the opening keynote address tomorrow morning at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Jacobs is expected to talk about Qualcomm’s vision for mobile computing as smart phones and tablets increasingly become a mainstay tool for consumer media and entertainment. The three-day show also will serve as a global stage for Sony Electronics, the San Diego-based arm of Sony’s U.S. business. San Diego’s Razer, Entropic Communications, Leap Wireless, Independa, Skin-It, and Marchon 3D, also are displaying products at the show.

—I profiled San Diego-based Verimatrix, a venture-backed company that develops encryption software and related security technologies for pay-TV networks. Verimatrix CEO Tom Munro told me the company has been successful in creating piracy protection software for Internet-Protocol Television (IPTV), and today more than half of the company’s business is in so-called unmanaged networks, such as Netflix, which provides streaming video “Over the Top” (OTT) of a cable- or satellite-based broadband Internet platform.

—The 2011 executive compensation survey showed a 3.7 percent increase nationwide in tech sector CEO pay over 2010. The annual CompStudy survey produced by executive search firm J. Robert Scott and law firm WilmerHale in collaboration with Noam Wasserman, associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. The study found that non-founder technology CEOs brought in average base salaries of $242,000 in 2011, up from $233,000 in 2010.

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EnVerv, a chip design firm based in San Jose, CA, says this morning it has raised $12 million in a Series B round for its “system-on-a-chip” technology, which enables a utility to use its own power lines to serve as a smart grid communications network.

Benchmark Capital led the new round, which was joined by existing investors New Enterprise Associates and Walden International. The proceeds will go toward further development and working capital.

Reza Mirkhani, the company’s San Diego-based founder, is now EnVerv’s president and chief operating officer. Since I talked with Mirkhani about EnVerv and its strategy earlier this year, EnVerv’s executive chairman, Shahin Hedayat, the former co-founder and CEO of Santa Clara, CA-based Beceem Communiations, has stepped in as CEO. (Irvine, CA-based Broadcom (NASDAQ: BRCM) acquired Beceem for more than $310 million in October 2010.)

EnVerv continues to maintain a San Diego office and also has established an office in China.

The fabless semiconductor company says it has developed and delivered a range of high-performance power line communication (PLC) modems for utility smart meters, PLC head-end modems, display modems, smart homes, solar panel control and monitoring, and other applications. In recent months, EnVerv says it has been field testing its products in cooperation with its customers and utilities.

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It was 1993 when the San Diego chapter of the American Electronics Association organized its first high tech industry awards to recognize local companies for their business excellence, technology innovation, community involvement, and sometimes simply for persevering in the face of adversity.

Since then, the nationwide organization that HP founder David Packard helped form in 1943 as the West Coast Electronics Manufacturers Association has morphed into the AeA, (in 2001) and TechAmerica (2009). Recently Tech America San Diego named the winners of its Eighteenth Annual High Tech Awards. The industry group handed out 10 awards in nine distinct categories:

—Software: Oceanhouse Media

—Internet/Web Commerce: Sorenson Media

—Computers and Related Products (two awards): AgigA Tech and One Stop Systems

—Communications Products and Services: MicroPower Technologies

—Software as a Service/Cloud-based Computing: ServiceNow

—Semiconductors, Industrial & Analytical Instrumentation: Creative Electron

—Cleantech: EcoATM

—Outstanding Emerging Growth: FieldLogix

—IT Service/Contract Services: Outsource Manufacturing-Made in San Diego

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In a very difficult climate for U.S. solar companies, one Boston-area startup has made some significant progress in solar technology. SiOnyx, a Beverly, MA-based semiconductor company known for its “black silicon” approach to various applications, including solar cells, is reporting today that it has achieved an overall efficiency that is higher than the current industry standard, and more uniform from cell to cell—and that this result should have commercial impact soon.

“We have a solar program that’s starting to have tremendous results,” says James Carey, the company’s co-founder and principal scientist.

When we last caught up with SiOnyx almost exactly a year ago, the company had just closed $12.5 million in second-round venture financing. (Its investors include Polaris Venture Partners, Crosslink Capital, and Vulcan Capital.) The firm’s black silicon technique involves peppering silicon wafers with ultrafast laser pulses to roughen their surface, such that they become more efficient at absorbing near-infrared light.

That means a solar cell made with the technique will absorb more light and, in principle, produce more electricity than one made of conventional silicon. But until now, the company hadn’t proven this to be the case in a manufacturing setting. In partnership with German research institute and chip foundry ISC Konstanz, SiOnyx has demonstrated an improvement of 0.3 percent in absolute efficiency—the ratio of electrical energy out to light energy in—over industry-standard silicon. (The cutting edge of conventional solar cells is just over 17 percent efficiency.)

Big deal? Well, it turns out that 0.3 percent represents roughly a year’s worth of progress in the traditional solar cell industry, says Chris Vineis, the company’s director of solar technology. “Existing solar cell manufacturers can take this [SiOnyx process], drop it into their line, and get an efficiency boost,” he says.

The SiOnyx technique is inserted in the early part of the conventional silicon wafer processing. The method substitutes lasers for chemicals in the initial texturing step, but the rest of the manufacturing process is untouched, Vineis says. The end result, he says, is slightly higher efficiency, potentially thinner wafers that use less silicon, and more uniform efficiency across wafers. Together, those factors could lead to savings of “several cents per watt,” Vineis says.

But it’s still early days for the company’s solar business. SiOnyx, which has nearly 30 employees and says it is still growing, is in initial conversations with potential solar customers. The idea is the company will license its black silicon process to solar cell manufacturers. “We’re not actually making solar cells, which is good for us,” Vineis says. “The industry is in a very tough spot.”

Solar is actually only a small part of the startup’s overall business, however. SiOnyx plans to make about 80 percent of its revenues on its image sensor products and 20 percent on its solar process, Carey says. The image sensor application, which I wrote about last year, uses the same black silicon technology to create fundamentally more sensitive cameras and other imaging equipment.

“We’re more than a one trick pony,” Carey says.

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Plastic, oil, natural gas, paper, solar panels, analytics, semiconductors, blimps, mobile phones, wind turbines, smart grid. These were some of the words tossed around by the six teams presenting at last night’s Cleantech Open Northeast Regional Finals. Three companies were selected to go on and compete in the Cleantech Open Global Forum in California next month. Interestingly, a few of the semifinalists are also part of the local startup program MassChallenge, which like the Cleantech Open, models itself as a startup accelerator and mentoring program with a business plan competition tucked into it.

Can you guess which of the words above apply to the three winning teams below? Take a look and see if you were right.

—PK Clean (a MassChallenge 2011 finalist) is “converting mountains of trash into barrels of oil.” The company has developed and tested a process that converts plastic waste into oil, using a proprietary catalyst. PK’s CEO Priyanka Bakaya, an MIT Sloan MBA, says the 45 million tons of plastic occupying landfills per year can be turned into about 9 billion gallons of oil (representing 25 percent of annual U.S. auto consumption). The company has already tested the tech at a pilot facility in India and is targeting the metal recycling industry as its first customers. After taking apart old cars, metal recyclers are left with plastic remnants that they have to pay to get landfilled. PK will take that away for free to turn into oil. There’s other competition in the field, namely from Portland, OR-based Agilyx (which recently raised $22 million in venture funding), but Bakaya says PK’s catalyst and cheaper process give it an edge.

—Qado Energy, a smart grid analytics startup, was the big IT play in the bunch. While maybe not as sexy as turning plastic to oil or printing invisible solar panels on paper (seriously), it’s aiming to solve a big problem for utilities and energy developers: accurately predicting the distribution and effect of new cleantech sources plugging into the grid. As co-founder Lorraine Wheeler explained, when wind or solar developers want to add their technology to the energy distribution grid, utilities have to perform studies analyzing the impact of the new tech on the grid, and produce a list of needed upgrades that the developer must pay for. Qado’s technology is designed to make this planning process more accurate and efficient, with software that pulls in utilities’ data from different sources and converts it to a standard format. From there, the potential effect on the grid can be modeled and analyzed in displays for utilities, regulators, and energy developers.

—Last up was fabless semiconductor developer Arctic Sand. The company is making smaller, more efficient power converter chips designed to cut down on the electricity needed to run traditional data centers. The company, whose team comes from MIT and Harvard, aims to design the chips for other applications like powering mobile phones and hopes to get its tech to the market through licensing deals with existing computing players, says CEO Nadia Shalaby. Arctic Sand was also a participant in MassChallenge earlier this year.

There were some familiar faces among the other three semifinalists. OsComp Systems—developers of a more efficient natural gas compressor—took home a check from MassChallenge last year and presented at our XSITE Xpo this year. Altaeros Energies also talked about its blimp-hoisted wind turbines at our Xpo. The last Cleantech Open Northeast semifinalist, Ubiquitous Energy, is working on the aforementioned printable solar photovoltaic cells for paper and fabric. The cells are designed to power mobile phones for owners in areas that aren’t even plugged into the power grid, and even further down the line, could enable dynamic displays on surfaces like cereal boxes (think digital display expiration dates). We’ll still have to keep an eye out for those teams.

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Connect, the San Diego nonprofit group for innovation and entrepreneurship, says it has selected three finalists in eight categories for the region’s 24th annual Most Innovative New Product (MIP) Awards competition. The 24 finalists were culled from more than 140 nominations submitted, according to a statement from Connect. The finalists in each category are evaluated by San Diego experts and business executives in that category. Winners will be announced at an awards luncheon, set for Dec. 9 at the Hilton La Jolla Torrey Pines.

The finalists in each category are:

Clean Technology

Genomatica, for Process that produces high-volume industrial chemicals from renewable feedstocks.

Noble Environmental Technologies, for proprietary ECOR process to produce environmentally friendly building materials.

Wildcat Discovery Technologies, for electrolytic process that makes environmentally friendly materials.

Communications and IT

Ethertronics, for its Ether 1.2.1 technology for embedded antennas in mobile devices.

Kyocera Communications for Kyocera Echo, a dual-touchscreen smartphone.

Swarmology for Swarm.it, real-time contextual search and marketing technology.

Life Science – Diagnostics and Research Tools

Biocept, for OncoCEE-BR diagnostic screening technology to detect circulating tumor cells.

Life Technologies, for Ion Personal Genome Machine, technology for semiconductor-based DNA sequencing.

Targeson, for ultrasound contrast imaging of VEGFR2 receptor on lining of blood vessels.

Life Science – Medical Products

Hypnoz Therapeutic Devices, for Jaw Elevation Device used to maintain open airway during medical procedures.

IOS Technologies, for technology that enables dental professionals to create digital impressions and 3-D models.

Optimer Pharmaceuticals, for fidaxomicin (DIFICID), a new antibiotic treatment for C. difficile.

Software

FICO, for Falcon Fraud Manager 6 Analytics, used to detect payment card fraud.

MOGL for MOGL, online restaurant mobile rewards program.

SwoopThat, for online technology that helps college students find cheapest online price for every book they need to buy.

Hardware and General Technology

Aculon, for Aculon AL-X and Aculon H1-X products, nano-scale films and coatings for a variety of survaces.

LifeProof, for LifeProof case for the iPhone 4.

Memjet, for high-speed inkjet printing technology.

Action and Sport Technologies

Hydroflex, for flexing surfboard design.

KVA Stainless, for technology to produce seamless stainless steel tubing, pipes, stamping, and forming.

TaylorMade Golf, for R11 Driver with movable weight than enables golfers to customize to their swings more precisely.

Aerospace and Security Technologies

Geodetics, for positioning and navigation technology for dynamic platforms offering a variety of processing, global positioning system (GPS) and inertial measurement unit (IMU) options that can be configured to cover a broad performance spectrum.

Langford & Carmichael, for ScenGen, a software program that generates all possible scenarios for a given situation at a very high speed.

MicroPower Technologies, for MPT2500 Rugged-i, solar-powered wireless video surveilance camera technology.

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San Diego semiconductor designer Entropic Communications (NASDAQ: ENTR) says today it has formed a strategic partnership with Zenverge, a Cupertino, CA-based chip design firm to work together on the next generation of multimedia products for home entertainment systems.

In a separate release, Zenverge says it has closed a $20.5 million Series D round of financing led by Entropic, which disclosed that it has invested $10 million in Zenverge. Both companies specialize in advanced media chips, and Entropic is a co-founder of the Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA). As part of their strategic partnership, Entropic and Zenverge plan to align their technology roadmaps and co-develop products developed for high-definition TV quality video and other multimedia products for the MoCA 2.0 home network.

In addition to Entropic, Zenverge says the CID Group and Woodside Fund also participated in the latest round as new investors. Existing investors DCM, Northwest Venture Partners, and Motorola Mobility Ventures all joined in the round as well. Zenverge says it will use the capital to expand and meet market demand for new and existing products. Entropic CEO Patrick Henry also joined Zenverge’s board of directors.

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NABsys, a Providence, MA-based gene-sequencing startup, announced today it has closed a $10 million Series C investment led by return investor Stata Venture Partners, the Needham, MA-based firm founded by Analog Devices (NASDAQ: ADI) co-founder and chairman Ray Stata (a member of the NABsys board of directors).

The new money, which brings NABsys’ total financing since inception to $21 million, will go to development and commercialization of the company’s solid-state electronic systems for single-molecule DNA sequencing and analysis. The technology uses silicon chips to detect the DNA sequences. Semiconductor pioneer Stata’s firm also led the $7 million Series B round in NABsys in February 2010.

There’s been a bit of buzz lately surrounding gene-sequencing technology developers. Ion Torrent, a new unit of Carlsbad, CA-based Life Technologies (NASDAQ: LIFE) is also developing a gene-sequencing machine that relies on semi-conductor technology. And earlier this year, UK-based Oxford Nanopore raised $41 million from investors including San Diego-based gene-sequencing giant Illumina (NASDAQ: ILMN).

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Semiconductor laser manufacturer nLight Corp. is heading toward a possible public stock offering after completing a $17.5 million round of venture financing from existing investors.

In an interview with VentureWire, chief financial officer Dave Schaezler said nLight is ”at a size where it makes sense to plan for an IPO,” although the Vancouver, WA-based company doesn’t have specific dates in mind for an initial IPO filing. (The full VentureWire story is behind a paywall, but a the Wall Street Journal’s Venture Capital Dispatch has a summary.)

The latest venture round included participation from longtime investors Oak Investment Partners, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Menlo Ventures, which nLight described in a release as having “a strong record of companies achieving initial public offerings.” nLight’s total equity funding stands at about $110 million.

The company, founded in 2000, makes lasers for a wide array of uses in medical, defense, and industrial scenarios. The company said it has continued to grow its profitability while adding more than 100 employees in the past year and booking more than $60 million in orders in the first six months of 2011.

The news is part of a long-term survivor’s tale for nLight. The company was started in Seattle, and initially focused on the telecommunications industry. That quickly changed when telecoms went through a huge downturn in 2001.

As we reported in this 2009 profile, nLight dropped from about 80 employees down to 20 and refocused on different sectors, an era that CEO Scott Keeney said the company “barely survived.” Looks like it’s paying off now.

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Lowell, MA-based M/A-COM Technology Solutions indicated in an SEC filing that it seeks to raise $230 million through an initial public offering. The company, which makes wireless chips, is owned by the semiconductor-focused private equity fund GaAs Labs, whose owner John Ocampo bought the firm for around $90 million in 2009. Lead underwriters for the deal are Barclays Capital, J.P. Morgan, and Jefferies.

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Here in the Boston area we like hard technologies. We like companies with weird names. We like companies that have vision. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: Tenebraex, SiOnyx, and MC10.

They are the micro-cluster of imaging tech companies. They are working on a mix of far-out stuff and closer-in products, with a multiple-focus approach that befits their chosen field. If they were superheroes, Tenebraex would have eyes in the back of its head (panoramic view); SiOnyx would see in the dark; and MC10 would morph into different shapes depending on what it was looking at. Taken together, they just might reinvent the cameras we use every day.

One example: Imagine an ultra-thin camera phone that can take high-resolution, wide-angle photos and video in a dimly-lit bar or restaurant, or outside at night. That’s what combining the companies’ capabilities could do—though, as far as I know, they are not working together.

Several months ago I first talked with Peter Jones, the CEO of Scallop Imaging, which is the fastest-growing division of Boston-based optical tech firm Tenebraex. Why am I telling you this now? One, I’ve been busy. Two, Scallop is about to debut its third camera product in September. Last week, Jones said the upcoming “as-yet-unnamed camera will be the industry’s first multi-megapixel panoramic camera for very low light environments.”

Scallop’s new camera follows in the footsteps of its earlier products: digital and analog versions of a device (see photo below) that stitches together images from five separate camera sensors into a 180-degree, distortion-free, high-res panoramic view, for security and surveillance applications. The advantage over traditional fisheye lenses and pan-and-tilt cameras? Image quality, cost, and convenience, Jones said.

Some recent customers include hotels, museums, retail stores, and the U.S. military. One of the more intriguing applications of the technology lies in robotics. Last winter, a U.S. Army research lab organized a contest at Fort Bragg, NC. A number of teams sent mobile robots into a remote area to beam back images—presumably to check out the surroundings without having to send troops in. The robot that used Scallop’s camera finished in the top two (in terms of meeting its objectives), and it was the only one that didn’t get stuck in the woods, Jones said. He attributed the performance in part to its wide field of view.

My colleague Wade first profiled Scallop Imaging back in 2008. Since then, the division has grown to about 50 people. Tenebraex, its parent company, is no flash in the pan either. The company started in 1992 and is profitable, having invested in Scallop “multiple millions” of dollars in research and development, Jones said. “The majority of our future growth will come from Scallop.”

The company’s upcoming low-light camera overlaps a bit with another local firm. … Next Page »

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San Jose, CA-based Intermolecular, which uses combinatorial chemistry techniques to help clients in the semiconductor industry speed up their research and development, filed S-1 papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission today in preparation for an initial public offering. The seven-year-old company says it hopes to raise $200 million in the offering—perhaps providing some liquidity for leading shareholders Redpoint Ventures (20.90 percent), CMEA Ventures (20.77 percent), U.S. Venture Partners (14.80 percent), Symyx Technologies (10.92 percent), and ATMI (10.62 percent). The company raised $15 million in fresh capital this March.

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The economic deep freeze is thawing for IPOs on U.S. exchanges, according to a quarterly report issued today by the Ernst & Young accounting firm.

The number of companies in registration for an initial public offering increased to 140 during the three months that ended June 30, according to the latest the “Ernst & Young U.S. IPO Pipeline” study. That’s almost 24 percent more than the 113 companies that were registered during the same quarter last year, according to Ernst & Young’s data. Beneath story, I’ve put together a list of companies in the IPO pipeline for each Xconomy city as of June 30.

Ernst & Young says the 140 companies now in the lineup represent a potential total of $23.7 billion in estimated market valuation. That’s down from the $25.3 billion in total value during the same quarter last year, but the highest number of companies registered to go public since late 2007, when the financial crisis was beginning to engulf the U.S. economy. Just 28 companies were in registration at the end of the second quarter in 2009, one of the darkest periods of the recession.

A total of 42 companies went public on U.S. markets during the second quarter, a 13.5 percent increase over the 37 IPOs during the second quarter of 2010.

The warming trend is good news for the venture firms and other investors that view IPOs as a key way to keep the capital flowing to new companies, and to exit from startup companies with a return on their investments. Of the 140 companies in the IPO pipeline, venture capital firms back 40 percent, 31 percent are backed by private equity firms, and 23 percent are backed by both.

Technology-related IPOs accounted for 25 of the total companies in the pipeline at the end of the quarter, and they are trying to raise a total of $4.4 billion. The oil and gas industry was the next bigger sector, with 17 companies trying to raise a total of $4.6 billion. Other active sectors include financial companies, retail and wholesale, and diversified industrial products. Here’s a breakout of companies in the pipeline for each Xconomy city: … Next Page »

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Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM), the San Diego wireless technologies giant, said today it has acquired certain assets related to gesture recognition technology from Sunnyvale, CA-based GestureTek—a move that points to new capabilities at its new Atheros unit.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. GestureTek, founded in 1986, specializes in machine vision technology that enables people to use hand and body motions to dynamically control computer-based information displayed on a screen or camera-enabled device. GestureTek says there is no need for users to wear, hold, or touch anything special for its proprietary technology to work.

In a statement, Qualcomm group president Steve Mollenkopf, says, “Applications processors are enabling a range of new ways for consumers to interface with their home entertainment and mobile devices. Our acquisition of key technology and assets from GestureTek will strengthen Qualcomm’s smartphone product portfolio and enable our customers to launch products with new and compelling user experiences.”

The acquisition appears tailor-made for Qualcomm Atheros, the business unit formed in May, after closing its acquisition of  San Jose, CA-based Wi-Fi chipmaker Atheros Communications for $3.1 billion. Qualcomm has explained the combined companies will advance development of products for “the connected home,” such as wireless technologies for displaying information from smartphones on high-definition TV screens and larger monitors.

Qualcomm says the GestureTek technology will be integrated into Qualcomm’s current and next-generation Snapdragon processors, providing possibilities for new types of user interfaces from Qualcomm customers making smartphones, tablets, and video game consoles. In the latter market, Qualcomm could be challenging established motion-recognition technologies developed for the Nintendo Wii, Playstation and Xbox360 video game console.

GestureTek has retained other assets to continue its its gesture-controlled public display and digital signage business. The company’s business has been focused on displays for kiosks, the healthcare industry, and consumer electronics.

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Ormet Circuits, a San Diego company with proprietary technology for printing circuit patterns on a variety of materials, has raised more than $1.7 million from equity investors, according to a recent regulatory filing. On its website, Ormet says its technology can print circuits with high electrical and thermal conductivity and good solderability on cardboard, plastic, and paper. The ink is cured to become a fused metal network that alloys itself to conventional circuit materials. The company says it is currently concentrating on the creation of electrical and thermal vias in multi layer structures.

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Marc Andreessen, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur-turned-venture-capitalist, said something interesting in last weekend’s New York Times magazine interview. It wasn’t his “there’s no tech bubble” spiel, or even his prediction that we’ll all be riding around in self-driving cars in 10 to 20 years, thanks to Google.

No, it was that he singled out “wearable computing”—portable devices like a pendant around your neck that record “everything around you all the time”—as a Next Big Thing. (Like Twitter, Facebook, or the iPhone, this could either be the greatest thing since sliced bread, or the downfall of humanity—or both.)

Now one Boston-area startup is taking the mechanics of the idea a step further. MC10, based in Cambridge, MA, is developing flexible (“conformal”) electronics that can bend, stretch, and wrap around to conform to surfaces in the natural world, like the human body. That’s a far cry from the guts of today’s computers, which are based on rigid silicon circuits that are laid out on flat surfaces.

The three-year-old company has garnered increasing attention for its efforts, raising a $12.5 million Series B round led by Braemar Energy Ventures last month. (North Bridge Venture Partners was the original venture investor in 2009.) MC10 also has a deal with Reebok to develop a wearable product that’s very hush-hush (probably electronics integrated into footwear or other apparel for monitoring performance). The startup has also collaborated with Massachusetts General Hospital and other institutions to develop a new type of balloon catheter, equipped with sensors, to assist with heart procedures. Next up: wearable power and newfangled image sensors.

“We’re trying to change the world by reshaping electronics,” says Dave Icke, CEO of MC10. Icke is a semiconductor industry veteran who was previously an executive with Advanced Electron Beams and Teradyne.

The idea of flexible electronics isn’t new. But unlike other approaches over the past decade, such as using organic semiconductor materials or microwires (which tend to be slow), MC10 uses high-performance silicon circuits, which means the devices could be as fast as the computers you’re used to using. The trick is in exactly how the silicon is laid out and combined with stretchy materials. Imagine little islands of silicon linked by springy interconnects—“like a Slinky in between,” Icke says—with the whole thing deposited on a pre-stretched polymer. Depending on the application, the team adjusts the thickness of the islands and the interconnects so as to minimize the strain on the circuitry.

MC10's silicon-based photovoltaic cells could be used for portable or even wearable, personal power generation (image: John Rogers, UIUC)

MC10’s technology is based on research done in the lab of John Rogers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who is a co-founder of the company. Rogers, a former postdoc with chemist George Whitesides at Harvard University, was the winner of the prestigious Lemelson-MIT Prize announced last month. And the glue for the whole team is Carmichael Roberts, the general partner who led North Bridge’s investment; Roberts also worked with Whitesides as a postdoc, and he knew Icke from a previous company. (Icke, for his part, had gone to business school with North Bridge’s Jamie Goldstein.)

That’s all well and good, but making a living as a hardware startup is no easy task, especially when you’re selling a new technology. So MC10 has identified a couple of potentially lucrative markets for the next phase of its growth. One is portable (or even wearable) power generation—a set of projects supported by existing government contracts. Imagine a flexible sheet of solar-cell material that coats or is woven into the surface of a tent or an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to absorb sunlight and store electricity. People have been talking about designing such a material for years, but MC10’s (see photo above) just might be good enough to make it work.

“Instead of having a bolt-on rigid box that gets attached to a roof or vehicle, [people could] integrate those efficient materials into a tent or awning, or into vests and clothing,” Icke says. … Next Page »

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San Diego’s Daylight Solutions, a six-year-old startup that specializes in mid-infrared laser technology, says today it raised $15 million in a Series C round of equity financing led by Northrop Grumman (NYSE: NOC), the Los Angeles defense contractor.

The funding comes less than a week after Daylight Solutions said its proprietary semiconductor laser had successfully completed U.S. Air Force field trials that tested the effectiveness of its infrared countermeasures technology against a variety of heat-seeking missile threats. Conventional infrared countermeasures typically involve firing a series of very hot flares that draw the missile away from targeted aircraft.

In a statement today, Daylight Solutions co-founder and CEO, Tim Day, referred to Northrop Grumman’s leading role in the round as an “additional endorsement of our technology and capability.” The company says the funding round, which was joined by existing investors, will enable Daylight Solutions to continue on a fast-growth curve while advancing its technology, expanding its product line, and improving its manufacturing capabilities.

As I explained in a 2009 profile of the company, Day and co-founder Paul Larson saw an untapped opportunity for solid-state lasers that operate at mid-infrared wavelengths, from 3 um to 12 um. It’s a part of the spectrum beyond visible light that Day described as “the color of heat.” The external cavity quantum cascade laser they developed is composed of extremely thin layers of Indium gallium arsenide, which the company now describes simply as a Quantum Cascade Laser (QCL).

The technology has a range of potential uses in medical diagnostics, environmental monitoring, scientific research, and defense because nearly all molecules absorb energy at specific wavelengths of the mid-IR spectrum. The company says multiple configurations of its JammIR product line were successfully tested by the Air Force and other defense contractors under environmentally demanding conditions for military aircraft, including both helicopters and planes. Daylight Solutions says its infrared laser can be mounted on aircraft and “aimed” at approaching missiles. The technology blinds and confuses a variety of missiles, including the ubiquitous shoulder-fired, heat-seeking missile that poses a serious threat to both military and civilian aircraft.

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If laser weapons and tools ever become mainstream, it might be because of a quiet little company called TeraDiode.

Sure, there are lots of more imminent (and perhaps more practical) applications for the Littleton, MA-based laser firm—welding, cutting metal, illuminating targets, and so forth—but blowing stuff up is what a laser was meant to do. At least if you grew up watching Star Trek phaser battles, Star Wars dogfights, and other forms of popular but admittedly dorky sci-fi entertainment.

TeraDiode, a two-year-old spinout from MIT Lincoln Laboratory, is commercializing a new kind of laser system, using what’s called a direct-diode laser, that it says is brighter, more powerful, and more focused than its predecessors. The technology is based on semiconductor lasers (which are electrically rather than chemically driven) plus a sophisticated optical system to manipulate individual beams to form a single output beam—a technique known as wavelength beam combining.

The 11-person company raised $4 million in a Series A round led by Stata Venture Partners in the fall of 2009, and is currently closing a second financing round from VCs and strategic investors, says founder and CEO David Sossen. The company has also landed some $3 million in U.S. defense contracts, he says.

Sossen, a veteran of Arthur D. Little and other firms, was a founding investor in TeraDiode, together with Fred Leonberger, a photonics expert from optical-tech firm JDSU. The startup’s laser technology, and its subsequent business development, is the handiwork of a couple of former Lincoln Lab scientists, Bien Chann and Robin Huang (no relation to the author), who both left to co-found the company in late 2009.

Lasers have been used in industrial applications for some 40 years. And the U.S. military has used lasers for decades, but in limited ways, because the devices tend to be bulky, inefficient (not enough power output), and prone to breakdown. To create a “directed energy weapon,” for example, a conventional chemical-based laser would need to be about the size of a building.

Until now, the limiting factors for laser diodes have been power output and beam quality. “We’ve broken through that barrier,” Sossen says, adding that his company’s relatively compact lasers (which for commercial uses are a bit bigger than a breadbox but smaller than competing devices) can output between several hundred and several thousand watts, and in principle up to 100 kilowatts (with a bigger laser)—enough power to do some real damage. And at different wavelengths, depending on the application.

TeraDiode envisions selling lasers “compact enough to be deployable on a tank or … Next Page »

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Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue, WA-based patent firm started by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold, is announcing a new two-way intellectual property deal with Boise, ID-based semiconductor maker Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU).
Like many licensing deals we see from Intellectual Ventures, this one gives Micron access to IV’s portfolio of “more than 30,000″ patents. The second element of the deal is an ongoing arrangement for the firms to buy patents from each other.
In a joint release, the companies said their deal “helps Micron protect its core business so it can focus on innovation.” Financial terms were not disclosed.

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Andover, MA-based SiGe Semiconductor, which first revealed its plans to go public last July, is instead set to be acquired by another Bay State semiconductor technology company, Skyworks (NASDAQ: SWKS). Woburn, MA-based Skyworks, whose analog and mixed signal semiconductors have applications in the military, medical, broadband, mobile, industrial, automotive, and energy management spaces, will pay as much as $275 million for SiGe, with $210 million in cash upfront, and potentially $65 million more if certain milestones are met.

Last year, SiGe proposed to raise $143.8 million in an initial public offering. “Skyworks clearly represents the best strategic and cultural fit for SiGe Semiconductor,” said Sohail Khan, president and chief executive officer of SiGe Semiconductor, in an announcement of the deal. As of last year, SiGe had raised about $130.7 million through the sale of preferred stock. According to a filing amended in March, SiGe, which makes fabless semiconductors for wireless multimedia applications, had revenues last year of $103.3 million, and net profits of $4.1 million. The acquisition by Skyworks has been approved by both company’s boards, and is expected to close in June, subject to customary closing conditions.

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