MEMS Start-ups in Silicon Valley - sites.ieee.orgsites.ieee.org/scv-mems/files/2018/08/Kurt_Petersen-SFBA-MEMS-Final.pdf · Early MEMS Companies in SV •National Semiconductor –Pressure

MEMS Start-ups in Silicon Valley

Kurt Petersen, PhD Silicon Valley Band of Angels

IEEE MEMS – SFBA; 5/30/18

Early MEMS Companies in SV

• National Semiconductor – Pressure sensors

• Foxboro ICT – Pressure sensors

• IC Sensors 1981 – Pressure sensors

• Microsensor Technologies 1981 – Stanford; Gas chromatograph

• Transensory Devices 1982 – Stanford and IBM; Advanced MEMS


NovaSensor - 1985

• VISION: be the most advanced MEMS company

• 10 weeks from first PO, to product development, to first product delivery – 50K pressure sensor chips

• Used “borrowed” fabs for first 1½ years

• Built our own 4” fab in 1986

• “Second” source product soon became first source – on-time deliveries

– advanced process allows MUCH tighter distribution of specs

• NovaSensor also pioneered Silicon Fusion Bonding and DRIE for commercial MEMS devices

• Today, NovaSensor has sales >$100M/year


NovaSensor Founding Team

Kurt

Janusz

Joe

NovaSensor

Bumpy NovaSensor Ride

• We were sued • We had major customers cut their orders in half • We had 2 major lay-offs • We had major contributors resign • We had trouble raising our B round • We replaced our CEO • We were forced to sell the company to Lucas • We were beat to the automotive accel market by an

upstart MEMS company, Analog Devices – they had CMOS, NovaSensor did not

• BUT, Janusz, Joe, and Kurt are still good friends


We had 2 lay-offs


We

were

sued

Merc News

front page

business

section

3/5/89 IEEE MEMS – SFBA; 5/30/18

Cepheid - 1996

• VISION: to transform molecular diagnostics using fast, real-time PCR and microfluidics

• Founders: Tom Gutshall, Kurt Petersen, Bill McMillan, Greg Kovacs, Lee Christel, Allen Northrup

• Investors: Mostly HNW individuals, CampVentures

• Investments: – self-funded for 18 months

– Series A - $3.2M - Mar 1997 - Band of Angels invested

– Series B - $10.5M - Nov 1998

– Series C - $19.2M - Feb 2000

– IPO - $32.4M - Jun 2000

• First product, research instrument, SmartCycler, began shipping 39 months after the company started

CBA Annual Conference IEEE MEMS – SFBA; 5/30/18

Bill, Greg, Kurt

in 1997

Tom, Bill, Kurt, Cris

in 1997

Cepheid Founding Team

One year later

First Crisis

• Negotiating with Applied Bio for real-time PCR license

• They granted the license, but one month before launch they specified in a letter that the real-time PCR capability cannot be used for SmartCycler !!!

• That was the ENTIRE PURPOSE of the SmartCycler !!!

• . . . . we decided to ignore the letter.

• It turns out that Applied Bio was setting us up for additional license fees for a yet-to-be-issued patent

• We set up a distribution agreement and hired our own limited sales staff

• SmartCycler sold well !!!


Cepheid Hardware Development

SmartCycler

for Life Sciences

GeneXpert

for Diagnostics

Optics/Reaction

RT-PCR Module


Cepheid First Shipments - 2000

Second Crisis

We had two small teams working on the microfluidics concept for the GeneExpert instrument and cartridge One team headed by an old friend, PhD in ME from UC Berkeley

One team headed by two young engineers who had already launched bio-tech products at other companies

Both concepts were viable

We/I decided to go with the two young engineers THEY HAD LAUNCHED Bio-Tech PRODUCTS PREVIOUSLY !!!

My PhD friend quit Cepheid – but we are still good friends today

GeneXpert design ended up as a MODEL for DFM !!

In the early days, sales yielded 85% margins on the instrument


Non-Dilutive DoD Funding

While the company VISION was always human diagnostics,

. . . . in 1996, at the initial founding, we began discussions with US DoD groups engaged in bio-warfare defense

Over a 4-5 year period, we received almost $20M from DARPA and other DoD groups

However, we were adamant in using the funds ONLY for development of the final commercial instruments

DoD funding hugely paid off when the anthrax attack was perpetrated and Cepheid technology was deployed across the entire USPS; 1728 mail sorting machines


1999 - 60 2001 - 115

The Cepheid Team

Cepheid IPO: June 21, 2000

Kurt

Cathy

Tom

Third Crisis

The CRASH of 2000

After doing an IPO in June, 2000 at $6/share, the stock crashed to as low as $1.50/share in Sept 2001.

It didn’t help that . . . SmartCycler sales were not meeting projections.

We raised $15M in very dilutive, post-IPO stock offerings

“Fortunately” the anthrax attack of Oct 2001 happened Cepheid still had a substantial presence in bio-warfare defense

Cepheid was ALL OVER the news – including Tom live on CNN

Stock jumped to >$8/share

Cepheid was the only bio-tech company which passed ALL testing for the USPS anthrax testing in mail sorting machines


1728 mail sorting machines in the US Postal Service.

Each performs one Anthrax test/hour.

Mail Sorting Environment

Fourth Crisis

In June of 2002, we recruited a new CEO John Bishop, experienced in DNA-based companies

He and his new CFO did a financial analysis of CPHD and decided that it would never get to 50% margins and we should just sell the company. Nobody was interested in buying . . .

WHY ??? We will address this later.

After a lot of cajoling, John finally accepted our VISION

CEO and CFO did a tour of Wall Street in late 2003

The stock soared to >$12/share after that tour


Fifth Crisis

After ramping up to production on the Anthrax assay for the USPS, we developed our first human diagnostic assay Group B Strep

We received FDA approval and began sales of the GeneXpert and the GBS assay in 2006.

WE WERE SO EXCITED !!

BUT, NO SALES !!!!!!!

No testing-lab wants to buy an instrument with only one FDA-approved assay!! They want a MENU of assays !!

Sales did not begin to take off for more than a year

When 2 more assays were FDA-approved


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Why wasn’t Cepheid Acquired Earlier

• We talked with Roche, Abbott, BD, Qiagen, bioMerieux

– EXTENSIVELY

• The premise of the GeneXpert was TOO ambitious !!!

• At the time, FDA required PCR to be practiced in 2 ROOMS

– One room for sample prep

– One room for PCR amplification

• Cepheid’s VISION was to do an assay in one CARTRIDGE

• No one believed that we could do it

• In 2006, Cepheid became THE FIRST company to have a CLIA “Moderate Complexity” amplified molecular diagnostic assay


Cepheid Today

• CPHD, was on NASDAQ, is one of Silicon Valley’s 100 largest companies – Total annual revenue of >$640M in 2016

– Revenue growth rate of ~20%/year

• Disposable, microfluidic cartridges with all reagents on board

• Wide range of instruments

• GeneXpert now has over 20 FDA approved human tests – Cepheid TB test rated by WHO as

“better than current gold standard”

• Acquired by Danaher in 2016 for $4B GeneXpert Infinity

GeneXpert I


SiTime - 2004

• It took >10 years and >$100M invested, but . . . • SiTime oscillators are now better than quartz in every way

– Quality and reliability

– Frequency stability over time

– Temperature and noise performance

– Size and cost (>100K devices on 8” wafer with ~98% yield)

• All other MEMS competitors have largely left the market

• Currently shipping >20M units/mo

• Cumulative shipments have reached >1B units • “#####” is one of the biggest customers – iPhone X • Acquired by Japanese co. MegaChips in 2014 for $200M


Joe Tom Aaron Kurt Markus

SiTime Founding Team


SiTime MEMS Oscillator

• Single crystal silicon resonator • Single-point attachment • High quality vacuum chamber • Created using DRIE

CMOS die

MEMS

die

• QFN packages • Chip on Board packages • 1.55 x 0.85 x 0.6 mm • <$0.30 ASP today


SiTime Projected Shipments (by Kurt)

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Verreon - 2009

• New technologies and designs for manufacturing sensors and other devices on GLASS instead of silicon

• Spun out of UC Berkeley; Al Pisano’s lab • Verreon was designed to be acquired by Qualcomm

– We hired a MEMS patent expert (Qualcomm LOVES patents) – We hired an operations person to round out the team – We documented an extensive IP portfolio

• Within one year, in April 2010, we were acquired and the team went to work for Qualcomm MEMS (QMT) – ( Thank God, because we had no Plan B ) – Verreon staff all rank in the top 1/3 at QMT – Four still work at Qualcomm

• We all have lunch on every anniversary of the acquisition


Verreon Founding Team

Kurt David KG Phil Nick Justin Ravi


Next Gen in vivo Chemical Monitoring

• Despite all the medical devices and “wearables” . . . .

• . . . no one is monitoring THE most important parameter

• The chemical status of our body

• E.g. The best implanted, continuous glucose sensors on the market today last only 5 days – AND continuous calibration with finger-sticks is often required

• Profusa has the first injectable chemical sensor to last 4 yrs

• No calibrations are necessary

• Device is an injectable piece of fluorescent plastic

• Over $22M granted by DoD (DARPA) and US NIH


Insulin pump

C ontinuous

G lucose

M onitoring

Profusa Vision

Glucose sensor :

The chemical sensor itself is totally passive: No electronics inside the body !! Communicates optically with a patch on the skin


Profusa Founding Team

Bill Ben Natalie

Kristen Soya Kurt


InvenSense !!!

• Founded by Steve Nasiri in 2003 (1st parts made at SNF)

• Became the de facto MEMS inertial company in 5 years

• IPO in 2011; acquired by TDK for $1.3B in 2016

• Challenged Bosch and STMicro for market-share

• First on the market for many products: – e.g. single chip 6-axis accel/gyro IMU

• Novel, innovative MEMS process

• Transformed the world of gaming

• Transformed the cell-phone

• Transformed IoT – Almost every IoT device has an IMU


• Chip-sized ultrasonic transducer and receiver allowing object detection and gesture recognition in a few square millimeter package with ultra-low power – size of a MEMS microphone

• Spun out of UC Berkeley: David Horsley

• Traction with drones, robots, VR/AR, wearables

• Acquired by TDK in March

MEMS Ultrasonics by Chirp


mobile wearables

auto/industrial stylus/gaming

• This third dimension of Touch enables a richer, more intuitive human interface.

• NextInput has developed a force sensitive touch technology – ForceTouch®.

• ForceTouch solution consists of three parts – MEMS force sensor

– Algorithms and software

– Mechanical design to implement the solution

Force Sensing

Tactile Force Sensor

developed at TDI

In 1984


Variable Capacitor Array

• First MEMS variable capacitor arrays – Cavendish Kinetics and WiSpry

• On the market for cell-phones in 2014 – (WiSpry briefly on the market in 2011)

– Cavendish has achieved >100B cycles

– Cavendish now in 40+ cell phones

First Application: Tunable Antenna


Three MEMS Speaker Start-ups

• Huge potential new MEMS market

• . . . BUT, a very difficult technical challenge. – Must move a LOT of air, at high and LOW frequencies, even for an

ear-bud or hearing-aid speaker

• Audio Pixels has >$400M market cap in Australia !!! – Uses electrostatic actuation

• USound in Austria has over 30 people – Uses piezoelectric actuation

• Tiki Audio in SV is still in stealth mode – Seems to use thermal actuation

• Will MEMS speakers be our next high volume product?


Mechanical Electrical Switches

• I built the first MEMS mechanical switches over 40 years ago

• Companies have been trying to commercialize such devices since then - no one has been successful in high volume

• Low lifetimes have been the primary problem

• Recently, there has been some success stories

• GE has spun off a start-up company after >10 years of R&D – Menlo Microsystems

– Switches operate in GE instruments

• IMT in Santa Barbara has sampled high performance devices

• Are we close to commercialization?


eXo: Democratizing Medical Imaging

Affordability Ease of Use

Founded by Janusz Bryzek

Three Generations of Diagnostics

• Generation 1 – Automatic pipetting machines – 96 well plates for samples – Buckets of reagents and waste

• Generation 2 – Totally disposable, single-use cartridge – All reagents/waste on board – Cepheid

• Next Generation – Totally disposable, single-use Instruments – Using micro-fluidics and sensor chips – All reagents/waste on board


• Xip Dx, out of UC Berkeley is bringing this type of test to a whole new level

• Uses a single silicon IC optical sensing chip

• First test is for troponin, a heart attack indicator

Totally Disposable Diagnostics

Metrika Developed a fully disposable hbA1C test in 2000. Sold to Bayer.


MicroFluidics for Life Sciences

• Fluidigm and Cepheid has been around for over 20 years – The first generation of microfluidic companies

• Microfluidics is now going through a renaissance – Photolithography on glass and plastic – High precision plastic injection molding (e.g. Enplas in Japan)

• Such high resolution fluidics allows cell-sized features – Enables the manipulation of individual cells – Enables reactions within individual cells – Enables the analysis of individual cells – Enables NextGen DNA/RNA sequencing

• High speed micro-droplets allows 100K+ samples/sec • Becoming de facto methodology for life science research


Zephyrus

• Traditional Western blot, is performed on 1000’s to millions of cells at a time

• You get an AVERAGE protein distribution

• Zephyrus spun out of UC Berkeley; then was 2 years in development

• Acquired by Bio-Techne in 2016


Combinati

Increasing Need for Digital PCR

• Quantification of the concentration of target DNA/RNA copies in a biological sample

• Combinati divides the sample into thousands of small, equal portions

• Then does real-time PCR on all the portions

• COUNTS the number of amplified portions; calculates concentration of the target

• Quantalife (using a different method) was acquired by BioRad in 2011 for $160M

• Combinati is easier to use for the customer

• Combinati has additional functionality

2.0pM

0.2pM

0.02pM

2fM


Droplet Manipulation

• HUGE trend in microbiology is toward single cell analysis

• This can be realized by µ-droplet manipulation

• QuantaLife

• 10X Genomics

• Mission Bio

• 100s of thousands of droplets per second

• Unparalleled functionality


Silicon Valley: Epicenter for MEMS

• YES, there are the Bosches & the STs of MEMS

• YES, there are the TIs & Knowles & Avagos of MEMS

• BUT, Silicon Valley has spawned more influential MEMS start-ups than anywhere else in the world

– Many more than I have mentioned in this presentation

• Silicon Valley has commercialized MEMS into more new disciplines than anywhere else in the world

• Silicon Valley continues to be THE leader in MEMS technologies, products, and innovation

• If you are doing a MEMS start-up, you’re in the right place


Thank You


Documents

MEMS Start-ups in Silicon Valley - sites.ieee.orgsites.ieee.org/scv-mems/files/2018/08/Kurt_Petersen-SFBA-MEMS-Final.pdf · Early MEMS Companies in SV •National Semiconductor –Pressure