| "It's been a pretty rocky road but we've hung in there and we're starting to do some pretty good things." SST Founder Deepak Divan |
As a tenured professor at UW-Madison and associate director of the Wisconsin Electric Machines and Power Electronics Consortium (WEMPEC), Deepakraj M. Divan had been heavily involved in developing cutting-edge power conversion technology. The problem was, many of these developments weren't moving beyond the laboratory workbench.
In 1995, Divan made a bold move to help bring these discoveries to industry more quickly. Taking leave from his faculty position in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, he assembled a small team and started Soft Switching Technologies Corp., based on an extremely efficient circuit he'd invented. Now in its fourth year, this Middleton-based company has become a world leader in designing and manufacturing power quality products, electric motor drives, high-current dc power supplies and custom engineering services.
Today, SST employs 30 people, including eight engineers who got their degrees from UW-Madison. Peter Sutherland, the firm's vice president for marketing, is also a UW graduate. He returned to Wisconsin after working in various other locations throughout the country. "A positive of such start-ups," says Dean John G. Bollinger, "is that these new companies are providing opportunities for experienced alumni to come home and benefit the economy."
Pictured with some of SST's product line are (from left) Deepakraj M. Divan, Associate Professor Ian Dobson and Glen Luckjiff. Divan was one of the founders of UW-TEC, an organization that creates entrepreneurial opportunities for UW-Madison students, faculty and staff.
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Divan says starting a technology related business from scratch was definitely baptism by fire. "It's been a pretty rocky road but we've hung in there and we're starting to do some pretty good things." The firm's biggest success to date has been an exclusive licensing agreement with Eaton Corporation to provide technology for propulsion drives produced in its Navy Controls Division, which has a production operation in Milwaukee.
Essential to this deal was the Navy's need for extremely quiet motor drives on its submarines. Soft switching resonant dc link inverters, which Divan invented and his company continues to enhance, meet just that specification, thanks to the invention of another UW-Madison team: Electrical and Computer Engineering Associate Professor Ian Dobson and PhD candidate Glen Luckjiff, who is also a senior design engineer at SST. Together, they patented a device called a modulator that runs Divan's circuit.
"The basic technology we had was already very quiet, but what [Luckjiff and Dobson] did with the advanced modulators was make them substantially quieter, and that was key to the Navy applications," explains Divan. Through funds from an Industrial & Economic Development Research grant (from University-Industry Relations, a technology transfer arm of the graduate school), Luckjiff and Dobson continue to test and improve their device.
Divan anticipates increasing demand for quiet motor drives. "It's one thing to have a whining motor sitting on a factory floor, but when the same motor is running in a lab or a clean room environment, it can be annoying. So in applications like that it would make sense."
Dobson says the modulator project incorporates a wide range of ideas. "It involves everything from advanced mathematics through engineering to industrial practice. It's fun and challenging to analyze and improve the modulator, and it's satisfying to see these ideas expressed through a better product made in Wisconsin. The project shows how close ties with industry can allow theoretical research to make a difference in developing products."
At the heart of making their modulators so quiet is geometry. Dobson and Luckjiff note that honeycomb-like hexagonal patterns (see photo) represent the six-fold symmetry of their device. "Glen and I have worked so much with this shape," jokes Dobson, "that it's impossible for either of us to look at a hexagon pattern in floor tiling without pondering the mysterious and useful connection between geometry and power supplies."
In addition to the Navy equipment, SST engineers have been busy developing a comprehensive line of their own standard and semi-custom power quality improvement products, which will be manufactured and sold under the SST name. "Every sign is that the products we're working on are exciting a lot of interest," says Divan. "They are showing performance levels that are unprecedented."
Luckjiff--the Soft Switching Technologies engineer and graduate student who has worked with both Divan and Dobson--says SST's origins are a prime example of how the university and industry can work together. "The WEMPEC labs at UW-Madison have created a lot of technology, but it is sometimes difficult to bring this to market. I think Deepak saw that as an opportunity."
As SST begins to make its mark as the world's only business of this type, Divan admits that leaving his tenured faculty position to develop a high-tech company was no small risk. "You name it and we've been there," he says of the hurdles he had to clear.
--By Paul Bauman--
| For further information, please contact: |
Ian Dobson, 608/262-2661
dobson@engr.wisc.edu
Copyright 1999 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
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Date last modified: Wednesday, 03-Mar-1999 12:00:00 CST
Date created: 03-Mar-1999
