Technological Barriers Fall Johnson Matthey Project Aims To Lower Cost Of Versatile Infrared Technology
It’s better to grow a cadmium zinc telluride crystal than to curse the darkness.
Because if you do, you can use it to construct an infrared device that will enable you to see in the dark.
And if you can grow those crystals big enough and fast enough, you can make enough money to hire someone else to curse the darkness, or anything else that needs cursing, for you.
At least that’s what they’re betting on at Johnson Matthey Electronics.
A couple of weeks ago, the company was awarded a $12.4 million federal grant for the third phase of a program designed to reduce the costs of infrared devices to the point where they become commercially practical.
The Spokane-based division of Johnson Matthey PLC has succeeded well enough in the first two phases of the program to attract attention from people who want to develop and sell infrared technology.
“This program has enabled Johnson Matthey to really capture the lion’s share of the multimillion-dollar materials market which supports the infrared industry,” says Duane Fletcher, Johnson Matthey’s manager for business development programs.
But the current market is just a fraction of what Johnson Matthey officials believe it will become if they duplicate their earlier success in this final phase of the project.
The company conducted a study of potential infrared device applications in the relatively narrow field of process control - things like monitoring industrial operations. They found the anticipated market is $1.6 billion.
And that’s just one of many areas of application for infrared devices once they become cheap enough for commercial applications. Through its research and development, Johnson Matthey will have put itself in the position of supplying the basic materials that make the infrared devices possible to most of those emerging markets.
“And that,” says Fletcher, “is where the revenues for Johnson Matthey come in.”
Five years ago, Johnson Matthey Electronics (JME) represented little more than a fistful of change in its corporate parent’s pocket.
Today, the electronics division contributes a third of Johnson Matthey’s operating profits. The division projects sales of $610 million in 1996. Local employment has more than doubled in the past decade to about 575.
JME has made such remarkable progress by being aggressive, and by guessing right about the future.
Johnson Matthey Plc is a 175-year-old British firm that built a global empire on the trading of precious metals.
Its small electronics offspring was a logical extension of the company’s precious metals interests. Its goal was to try and capture some of profits from the growing world semiconductor industry.
In 1986, Johnson Matthey acquired Cominco Ltd.’s Spokane manufacturing facility, which specialized in the production of high-purity precious metals. Johnson Matthey made Spokane the headquarters of its limited worldwide electronics operations.
Microchips, the tiny electronic brains that give life to computers, are comprised of a silicon wafer base coated with thin layers of these metals. JME’s principal mission was to supply these highly purified metals in the form of doughnut-shaped “sputtering targets.”
Over the past five years, though, the electronics operation has exploded. As the demand for microchips has grown, a JME strategy to increase its world market share in all its product offerings has been spectacularly successful. Recognizing the potential, Johnson Matthey has invested heavily in its electronics division, committing more than $40 million in capital projects in Spokane alone, and growing the division through a series of acquisitions as well.
The company’s interest in the infrared program four years ago is an example of Johnson Matthey’s willingness to invest in potential markets.
In its work with metals purification, JME became involved with exotic metal alloys. The growth of metal crystals based on those alloys was a logical extension of that work. So when the federal Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) asked for bids on a contract to try and reduce the costs of such crystals, JME was ready.
Like computers, infrared devices - essentially cameras that record the infrared spectrum rather than the visible spectrum of light - are based on a kind of microchip. But these microchips must be built on a thin slice, or “substrate,” of cadmium zinc telluride crystal rather than silicon.
Because these crystals were hard to produce, and because their limited size yielded substrates that were very small, the infrared devices have been extremely expensive to build. So expensive that the traditional field of application was generally limited to the military. The Pentagon uses infrared devices as heat-seeking guidance systems for missiles and smart bombs.
Some airlines have begun to adapt some of the devices to allow commercial airplanes to “see” through fog, snow and darkness, so they can land and take off more safely in inclement weather. But the expense of these systems limits their use.
One of ARPA’s missions is to convert military-government technology to commercial uses. Bringing down the costs of that technology has obvious benefits to the government, and commercial applications represent a return on taxpayer investment in government research and development.
“We are not trying to create a technology,” explains Benoit Pouliquen, president of JME’s semiconductor products group, “We are just making an existing technology more available.”
The ARPA program teamed Johnson Matthey with university research groups and other private corporations, some of them JME’s competitors, to try and reduce the cost of producing the substrates, and increase the size of the crystals so the substrates extracted from them would be larger.
“Without the research and development dollars from ARPA,” says Fletcher, “it would be very challenging for Johnson Matthey to go forth and investigate these materials because of the sheer cost of research and development.”
“The other thing these government programs do that would be very difficult under any kind of internal financing,” adds Pouliquen, “is the ability to get people together and exchange the technology and make it progress by leaps and bounds in the matter of a few years.”
When the program started, Johnson Matthey could produce a 2-by-3 centimeter substrate. By the end of the second phase of the grant, JME was routinely yielding 3-by-4 centimeter substrates.
When the program started, a 3-by-4 centimeter substrate would have been practically beyond value because it was so rare. A year ago, the company sold the thin, flat 3-by-4 slabs of cadmium zinc telluride crystal for $6,200. Today, the price is $5,000.
JME is beginning to produce a few 4-by-6 centimeter substrates, and by the end of the third phase of the program in about two years, they will be routine. One goal is to achieve 6-by-8 centimeter substrates.
In the third phase of the ARPA contract, which has now pumped about $41 million federal research and development dollars into JME’s Spokane facilities, the company must establish a demonstration production line that can show the ability to consistently produce the larger crystals in commercial quantities.
As the costs of the materials continue to fall, other companies will begin to make commercial infrared devices. Infrared video systems could become universal equipment in commercial aircraft. Eventually, automobiles could be equipped with the same systems, allowing drivers to drive more safely in darkness, fog and rain.
Industrial and medical applications abound.
JME will not manufacture the devices. That will be left to some of its partners in the ARPA project, like Texas Instruments, Loral Corp. and the Santa Barbara Research Center.
But JME will clearly have a huge advantage over any other company that wishes to provide the exotic materials needed to build the devices.
“The feasibility, from a technological standpoint, to do all this has existed for several years,” says Pouliquen. “The cost is the issue. Nobody is going to buy the option of putting a heat sensing camera in their car if that option costs them $50,000.
“But if it costs $500,” he adds with a smile, “that changes everything.”
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