Scott Hanson is only 27 years old, but he has spent the past six of those years obsessively working on one project—developing low-power circuit technology that can stay on for years, even decades.
That was his project when he started working on his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in 2004. Today, all that work is beginning to pay off as his company, Ambiq Micro, recently won $250,000 from venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson and communications technology company Cisco Systems in a business plan competition.
It’s a step along the way to what Hanson hopes will be the closing of a million-dollar seed round of funding within the next two months. The goal is to commercialize low-power microcontrollers for ultrasmall wireless devices like smart credit cards and ultralong-life wireless sensors for smart homes and buildings.
The journey for Hanson began when, as a doctoral student, he and his colleagues were trying to make smaller electronic medical devices that can last for five or 10 years at a time in the body, including intraocular pressure sensors for glaucoma patients—millimeter-scale devices implanted in the eye to monitor pressure fluctuations.
“So, we spent a number of years working on that, and came up with a string of technologies that today is being rolled out in the form of Ambiq,” Hanson says.
“Our product will be the world’s most energy-efficient microcontroller,” he says. “At this point, the one we are developing next is a sixth-generation microcontroller. With each generation, we add new bells and whistles, and make it closer to an actual product.”
The barrier to an “actual product” is one that faces many researchers and companies that work in the realm of the very tiny: interfacing their technologies with existing sensors and other off-the-shelf parts. So, Ambiq has spent the past year working not on new technology development, but making something that is usable outside the lab.
This barrier has not been a deterrent for judges at a number of business plan competitions
