Firms Electrified With Grant Money
by August 28, 2006 12:00 am 73 views
In late July, two electronics companies with direct ties to the University of Arkansas each received Phase II grants worth $750,000.
Lynguent Inc. is an analog/mixed-signal (AMS) design engineer, co-founded by Alan Mantooth, professor of electrical engineering at the UA. The company is based in Portland, Ore., but has a research laboratory at the Genesis Technology Incubator at the UA Research and Technology Park in south Fayetteville.
The Small Business Innovation Research grant is from the United States Defense Threat Reduction Agency. The two-year grant will support research for the company’s ModLyng product. ModLyng is a graphical interface intended for use by AMS design teams including design engineers and semiconductor device modeling engineers.
Another company, Arkansas Power Electronics International Inc., headed by Alex Lostetter, a former student of Mantooth, received a Phase II SBIR from the Department of Energy.
The grant will help the company develop a high-efficiency, 100-kilowatt three-phase power electronic inverter made with silicon carbide power switches. Or, in layman’s terms, the technology has the potential to save billions of dollars in wasted energy by improving the efficiency of devices that transport electricity.
The DOE grant is the fifth Phase II for the company. The total value of all five grants is $3.2 million.
Lostetter said APEI makes about $2 million a year in revenue.
“I spend more time managing growth than anything,” Lostetter joked. “I don’t really get in the lab much.”