APEI Drills Into Power Electronics

An ape is crushing an electric motor in the corporate logo used by Arkansas Power Electronics International Inc. of Fayetteville. Genesis Technology Incubator Director Bob Friedman said that’s not because the firm is monkeying around.

Friedman called APEI one of the most promising Genesis clients with serious commercialization potential. The high-pressure, high-power electronics and electric motor drive company has already received $724,000 in Small Business Innovation Research and other grants just since its 2002 inception.

Alex Lostetter, APEI’s president and senior engineer, said the logo represents the company’s focus on miniaturizing power electronics, and the ape is a take-off on its name.

The firm’s focus is designing electric motor drives for next generation U.S. Army tanks and troop transport vehicles.

The excessive amounts of heat given off by switch systems in large electric motor drives requires them to be equipped with heat sinks, something that dissipates heat and takes up precious space. If APEI can perfect its “packaging” of high-temperature silicone carbide microchips into electric drives, the heat sinks won’t be needed.

“The Army is very interested in high-temperature electronics,” Lostetter said. “The next generation of military vehicles will likely be electronic or hybrids and probably remote controllable.”

APEI is located in 400 SF of space at the UA Engineering Research Center, and it also plans to build a 1,500-SF laboratory there.

APEI has four employees now and is in the process of adding three more. Lostetter said he can envision the need for another three to five employees in the next year, and that the need for a larger facility will be likely in two years. But he wants to stay put because access to the UA’s High Density Electronics Center (HiDEC) has been invaluable.

“It’s been a lot of hard work and long hours,” Lostetter said. “Ultimately, we want to remain headquartered in this area and recruit from the UA to give engineering graduates a place to work. I would like to get to the point where we can give back to the UA as a way of thanking them for the help they’ve given us.”

APEI started with a $14,000 UA Innovation Incubator grant in May of 2002. That was enough to add a graduate student. Then in 2003, it earned a $60,000 Phase I Small Business Innovation Research Grant from the Microdevices & Wide Bandgap Group division of the U.S. Army Research Lab in Adelphi, Md. That relationship flourished, and this March APEI wound up with a $500,000 defense contract to develop DC to DC power supply devices.

Along the way, it also won a $100,000 SBIR award in January from the National Science Foundation and another $50,000 in March from the Arkansas Science & Technology Authority.

Lostetter, a Virginia native, did his doctoral thesis at the UA on high-temperature silicone carbide packaging, essentially taking microchip devices and using them in high-temperature situations. One of his co-advisors at the UA, professor Kraig Olejniczak, was approached by Jack Cole, president of Cole Engineering Inc. in Fayetteville, about developing a product to be used by the petroleum industry.

Cole does consulting and develops tools for subsurface diagnostics and imaging which are used to detect oil and gas.

APEI then got its start by trying to help Cole incorporate high-temperature microchips into downhole orbital vibrators (DHOV) that bore two to three miles into the earth and face temperatures above 300 degrees Celsius. The DHOVs send out acoustical signals that can map underground areas.

“APEI has helped me develop motion controllers that I can put down the well,” Cole said. “They’re a real sharp young outfit.”

Lostetter said he decided to start the company in Northwest Arkansas rather than fight the crowds and hour-commutes in cities such as Los Angeles or Washington, D.C.

APEI’s technology is not quite yet to a point where it could be manufactured for commercial markets. The microchips APEI uses come from SemiSouth, a partnering startup in Starkville, Miss., that by next year is expected to introduce commercial silicone carbide power transistors to the world. APEI hopes to eventually offer those devices in high-temperature packages.

“Initially, it would be low-volume production that we would do in-house,” Lostetter said. “We just have to keep expanding our avenues by building additional relationships like we have with the Army. We have to make new contacts to allow the business to grow.”