NEW YORK-Under non-disclosure agreements with 40 companies worldwide, Integral Technologies is testing its patent-pending “plastenna” compound, which allows the skin of a phone to double as a transceiver, and expects to complete preliminary deals for final prototypes and initial purchase orders from four or five this summer, said William Robinson, chairman and chief executive officer.
“Plastenna works great as a monopole, as a dipole and in a cell phone, but one of the things we still need to figure out is how to tune it. Maybe one of the companies we sign an MoU with will offer some of their RF engineers to help with this because one of the things we are lacking is personnel. There are only eight people in this little company,” Robinson said.
The Bellingham, Wash., think tank and business incubator, which has a $25 million line of credit from Swartz Investments, Atlanta, and $10 million in angel investments from business associates, is working hard to keep up with demand.
Describing himself as a career venture capitalist who builds companies “to the point where it’s time for someone else to take the reins,” Robinson said Integral Technologies has gone “from robbing Peter to pay Paul,” to the point where “several large investment banks are interested in putting a big whack of dough into our company.”
Integral received a major boost late last year when it entered into a development and marketing agreement for its injection-moldable composite antenna material from General Electric Corp.’s plastics division, a major supplier to the wireless device industry. Ravi Mirchandani, a 30-year veteran of General Electric, mostly with its plastics division, joined Integral Technologies in March as its vice president of business development.
Before joining Integral Technologies, Thomas Aisenbrey, vice president of business development and inventor of plastenna, said he spent 27 years designing computers, mostly for the military, “and this led me to RF because the PC (personal computer) is going wireless.”
Because of its three-dimensional receptivity to radio transmissions, plastenna “gives another level for grabbing onto signals,” he said. This capability allows it to mitigate some of the canyon effect that interferes with signals in areas with mountains or skyscrapers. Additionally, plastenna’s properties allow it to refocus signals dynamically.
“We have met with most of the big cell-phone makers, and everyone is enthusiastic. The data looks great, but at this point I don’t want to give out any numbers about (reception) improvement,” Aisenbrey said.
“But it’s not only about performance. From an assembly standpoint, this is huge because we can cut part counts by up to 50 percent by injection-molding the antenna into the cell-phone body.”
Cell-phone makers also would benefit from reductions in replacement costs for broken or damaged external antennas, a significant cause of warranty repair orders. Plastenna can be pierced and torn to a certain extent without destroying its antenna capabilities, “and in 99.9 percent of cases, the electronics inside the phone will wear out before the antenna does,” Aisenbrey said.
“Another dimension is that conventional antennas are designed to work in one wavelength, but because of plastenna’s broadband nature, one element works through several different frequencies. We’ve demonstrated 130 MHz through 5 GHz. It keeps a fairly nice balance through the different frequency ranges so it could also be a really nice solution for the new ultrawideband.”
Camouflaging an antenna into the body of a communications device also is a theft deterrent. It is this characteristic that led Orbcomm Global L.P. to enlist Integral Technologies for development of a global positioning system/low earth orbit antenna for tracking mobile assets. Late last year, Orbcomm projected it will add at least 75,000 new subscribers through mid-2003 who are likely to purchase the plastenna GPS/LEO antenna for $79 to $149 apiece, depending on application and quantity.
Integral Technologies is homing in on concluding an outsourced manufacturing agreement for the Orbcomm antennas, Aisenbrey and Robinson said.
