Published: January 30, 2010

Tiny Technology

By KARL KLOOSTER

Of the News-Register

In the high-tech world, startups and spin-offs are commonplace. Someone comes up with a brilliant idea and starts a small company focused on perfecting a new process or manufacturing a highly specialized product.

Often, these products are designed to complement or augment existing technologies. A new process or an improvement on an older one - old being relative in this ever evolving environment - can take the technology to another level.

A scientist or engineer who has been the lead or solo developer of a patentable idea, or an idea that requires a demanding level of expertise to implement, may decide to strike out on his own. The concept is sometimes so compelling it attracts grants or other sources of funding.

Scientists as entrepreneurs. It's one of the most fascinating and dynamic elements of American business today. And a classic example of just such a modern era success story had its origins right here in our own backyard.

Applied Physics Technologies of McMinnville, founded in 1995, is internationally known for the manufacture of a product line that is as scientifically specialized as it gets - electron sourcing.

Linfield Research Institute was the fertile environment in which APTech's embryonic beginnings were nurtured.

Company co-founder and president William Mackie, a Linfield College physics professor, is a 1971 Linfield graduate who earned his doctorate at the Oregon Graduate Institute.

He came back to work for his alma mater in 1984. He assumed roles as both a faculty member and researcher at LRI, joining a distinguished list of scientists and academicians who have staffed and administered the school's research arm since its founding by Dr. Walter P. Dyke in 1955.

Since then, LRI's work has resulted in the formation of three spin-off companies. The initial entrepreneurial venture was Field Emission Corp. or FEMCOR, established in 1958 and adsorbed by Hewlett-Packard in 1971.

That acquisition resulted in the presence of a sizable H-P facility adjacent to the Linfield campus for 27 years.

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After selling FEMCOR, LRI launched another field emissions enterprise, FEI. And it has grown into a multi-million-dollar 1,800-employee corporation based in Hillsboro.

FEI manufactures scanning and transmission electron microscopes - the world's most sophisticated magnification devices. Electron microscopes use a particle beam of electrons to illuminate an object and produce a highly magnified image.

Light-powered optical microscopes are limited by the laws of physics to 1,000 times magnification.

The latest generation of electron microscopes, which employ wavelengths about 100,000 times shorter than optical microscopes, can achieve magnifications up to 2 million times. In other words, they provide the capability of observation at the molecular level and beyond.

The value of the technology for microscopes alone has been incalculable.

By definition, the electron microscope needs an ample and consistent source of electrons to work its observational magic. That's where Bill Mackie and his company - the third LRI spin-off - entered the picture.

Government and academic researchers began clamoring for products made possible by harnessing these technologies.

In 1995, Mackie and his then partner, Gary Cabe, formed Applied Scientific Technologies. The company was an outgrowth of a decade of research at LRI on transition metal carbides and thermionic and field electron sources, which had evolved from LRI's five decades of field emission investigation.

APTech would "grow" refined sources of electrons for use in electron microscopes and other high-tech applications.

FEI needed lots of electrons. APTech would find the best way to supply them.

There you have the short and simple scenario. But how Mackie and Cabe got from point A to point B took not only highly specialized knowledge, but considerable testing and tweaking of an innovative production process to get it just right.

APTech creates refined single crystal rods rich in easily extracted electrons. Three elemental materials - tungsten, lanthanum hexaboride and carbide -are used to make rods for slightly differing applications.

It's a slow, painstaking process wherein the medium is suspended in a vacuum chamber and exposed to heat. A rod 1-3/4 inch long and 5000th of an inch in diameter grows drip by drip from the bottom up, the way a stalagmite is formed in a cave.

For more inquiring minds, detailed descriptions of how all this works can be found on the Internet. For serious students of math and science, references to professional publications are also available. For the rest of us, it will hopefully suffice to say that the applied science of electron magnification and imaging is a very valuable, if not indispensable, tool for every scientific research discipline and technology centered industry.

Medical research and analysis and disease diagnosis, semiconductor and microelectronic quality control, pharmaceuticals, petroleum, pulp and paper, metallurgy and mineral processing, industrial materials, to name but a few, all benefit from putting the electron to work.

Operating from its headquarters in the heart of the McMinnville Industrial Park, off Riverside Avenue, Applied Physics Technologies is developing lithography and x-ray applications as well as the prototype for a tabletop scanning electron microscope in addition to production of electron sourcing material for a global market.

On a daily basis, APTech's 12 employees play an essential role in this at once immensely large and infinitesimally small contribution to the advancement of society.

According to Mackie's calculations, an electron microscope uses approximately 60 billion electrons per second to do its thing. Without that fuel, the engine wouldn't run.

The most advanced electron microscopes cost as much as $5 million each. But they are so powerful, they are capable of capturing an image of the nano-sized, negatively charged, sub-atomic particles that make it all possible.