PUBLICATIONS

NIST

I nduatrial

Impacts

A 5ampliii0

of Successful

Partnerships

National Institute of

Standards and Technology

Technology Administration

U.S. Department of Commerce

A Note to U.S. Industry

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has a mission to work in

partnership with industry toward the shared goal of strengthening the nation's

technological and economic bases. Here are a few examples of how we are fulfilling our

mission:

Crucible Compaction Metals, a company in Oakdale, Pa., wanted technical

assistance in honing a new way to make high-performance metal parts. They tumed

to NIST where they joined a handful of companies with similar goals in a research

consortium that taps into a variety of NIST specialists and advanced equipment. The

company ended up increasing productivity by 40 percent.

SDL Inc. of San Jose, Calif., wanted to develop a high-risk laser technology, but the

risk was too great for them to bear alone. So they, too, tumed to NIST, which

administers the Advanced Technology Program to share costs with industry for

developing high-risk, enabling technologies with commercial payoff. With

unexpected swiftness after the start of their project, SDL had three spin-offs on their

hands—and on the market.

Thomson Berry Farms of Duluth, Minn. , wanted to automate the way they make

jams, syrups, dressings, and vinegars. They contacted NIST's Upper Midwest

Manufacturing Technology Center, which is part of a growing nationwide network of

assistance centers managed by NIST. The advice they received helped the company

increase their productivity by 50 percent while almost quadrupling their

manufacturing capacity.

Ames Rubber Corp. in Hamburg, N.J., made the NIST connection in the form of a

coveted Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. This award, which was

established by Congress in 1987, is the most visible outcome of a program designed

to promote and recognize quality in the business sector. The stringent criteria to

qualify for the prestigious award are playing an increasing role in the way Ames and

many businesses mn.

This booklet briefly chronicles these and other recent cases in which U.S. companies and

NIST have crossed paths to their mutual benefit. We hope that they will encourage you to

explore how you too can take advantage of the opportunities for collaboration with a

technology agency that's designed to work with industry.

Hoping to hear from you.

Arati Prabhakar, Director

Contents

NIST at a Glance 5

Organizational Contacts 6

Advanced Technology Program Impacts 7

Manufacturing Extension Partnership Impacts 25

Laboratory Impacts 39

Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Impacts 75

Index of Companies 79

Index of Apphcations 80

3

NIST at a Glance

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has a primary mission to promote

U.S. economic growth by working with industry to develop and apply technology,

measurements, and standards. NIST, an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce's

Technology Administration, carries out this mission through a portfolio of four major

programs.

The Advanced Technology Program, the fastest growing component of the NIST

portfolio, began in 1990 as a rigorously competitive cost-sharing program designed

to help industry pursue high-risk, enabling technologies with significant

commercial potential. The program provides multiyear funding to single companies

or industry-led joint ventures. Beginning in 1994, the bulk of ATP Rinding was

applied to focused program areas targeted at specific, well-defined technology and

business goals. The focused programs—each identified and defined from industry

input—support multiple projects that complement and reinforce each other.

The Manufacturing Extension Partnership is a growing network of organizations to

help small and medium-sized manufacturers to adopt new technologies. The MEP

helps these companies through manufacturing extension centers and

linking/networking technologies and programs that connect participants into a

nationwide system. That includes links to outreach and technical assistance

programs of other federal, state, and local organizations.

The oldest component of NIST's portfolio resides in its laboratories—electronics and

electrical engineering, manufacturing engineering, chemical science and

technology, physics, materials science and engineering, building and fire research,

computer systems, and computing and applied mathematics. These labs maintain

world-class expertise in measurements, standards, data evaluation, and test methods

with specific efforts planned and implemented in coordination with industry.

The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, first presented in 1988, quickly has

become both the U.S. standard of quality achievement in industry and a

comprehensive guide to quality improvement. NIST manages the award program,

which recognizes up to two awardees each year in the categories of manufacturing,

service, and small business.

There are many specific mechanisms by which the private sector interacts with NIST's

3,200 scientists, engineers, technicians, and support personnel either in Gaithersburg,

Md., or Boulder, Colo. They range from shot-in-the-dark problem-solving phone calls

to more fonnal and long-term collaborations, including cooperative R&D agreements,

R&D contracts, workshops, guest researcher agreements, patent licenses, and research

consortia involving several companies and NIST. Direct assistance is available to smaller

manufacturers from the NIST manufacturing extension centers around the country.

5
Organizational Contacts

General Inquiries

(301) 975-3058

email: inquiries@enh.nist.gov

Advanced Technology Program

(800) ATP-FUND

email: atp@micf.nist.gov

Manufacturing Extension Partnership

(301) 975-3593

email: mepinfo@micf.nist.gov

Malcolm Baldrige National Quality

Award

(301) 975-2036

email: oqp@micf.nist.gov

Laboratory Programs:

Electronics and Electrical Engineering

(301) 975-2220

Manufacturing Engineering

(301) 975-3400

Chemical Science and Technology

(301) 975-3145

Physics

(301) 975-4200

Materials Science and Engineering

(301) 975-5658

Building and Fire Research

(301) 975-5900

Computer Systems

(301) 975-2822

Computing and Applied Mathematics

(301) 975-2728

Technology Services:

Standards Information Center

(301) 975-4040

Weights and Measures

(301) 975-4004

Laboratory Accreditation

(301) 975-4016

Technology Commercialization

(301) 975-3084

Standard Reference Data

(301) 975-2208

Standard Reference Materials

(301) 975-6776

Calibrations

(301) 975-2002

Technology Evaluation

(301) 975-5500

6
Advanced

Technology

Program

Impacts

NIST

Indudtrial

Impact

Company.

Accuwave

Santa Monica, California

business:

Fiber-optic telecommunications

Number of Employees:

10

1

The National Institute of

Standards and Technology is an agency of the U.S. Department

of Commerce's Technology

Administration. NIST promotes

U.S. economic growth by working

with industry to develop and apply

technology, measurements,

and standards.

August 1994

"As magnificent as they are, today's

optical-fiber networks are still very

primitive," muses Accuwave CEO

Neven Karlovac. They are reminiscent

of the early days of radio—

a

transmitter, a receiver, and you tum

the signal on and off. Radio has come

a long way. Tight, efficient use of the

available spectrum has made possible

a multiplicity of closely spaced AM,

FM, and cellular phone channels.

Fiber-optic networks have a way to go.

Karlovac's company has a way to get

there. The small (10-person) Santa

Monica company was a high-tech

start-up in 1990, with a nifty

technology in search of useful

applications. Accuwave could use holograms "written" in the interior of

thick, photorefractive crystals to

separate a mixed beam of light into

separate wavelengths. It seemed

the basis for a very compact,

discriminating "multiplexing"

technique to allow many separate

channels to share a single optical

fiber simultaneously.

Commercial systems have been able

to multiplex a few channels on a

fiber, but Accuwave had demonstrated

techniques that—in principle

could do 10 times better.

Multiwavelength light entering one end of an Accuwave "volume

holography" crystal would encounter

a series of holographic gratings, each

tuned to reflect a specific wavelength

while passing all others with minimal

loss.

What Accuwave didn't have was the

in-house resources to develop their

technology to the point where they

could plausibly enter the huge, highly

competitive communications market.

In particular, they wanted to extend

their technology, developed for visible

light, to the infrared wavelengths

more commonly used for

long-distance telecommunications.

Their entree was a 1992 NIST

Advanced Technology Program award

for $2 million. "As a small company,

we couldn't have entered the

telecommunications market with the

"The ATP award

enabled us

to take our

technology

and develop a

prototype and

make it real."

resources to develop a product

without the ATP award," says

Karlovac. "The award enabled us to

take our technology and develop a

prototype and make it real."

Very real. Although the ATP project is

still underway, Accuwave has spun

off some early results as new products.

"As an offshoot of that work we have

focused on a particular market need

for wavelength standards," explains

Karlovac. Just as every radio

transmitter has a crystal to tune it to a

specific wavelength, multichannel

fiber-optic networks need a "crystal"

to define specific wavelengths for each

channel. Such a wavelength reference

is necessary to control the transmitter

wavelengths and important for

networking monitoring equipment to

ensure that you have the correct channel on each wavelength.

9
At ajuly 1994 conference on optical

networks, the company unveiled three

new products based on early results of

their research program: an optical

network monitor, a wavelength

standard, and a wavelength "locker"

to allow tighter control of laser

wavelengths on optical networks.

"As far as we know," says Karlovac,

"these are unique products. They've

created a category of their own. To get

the same functionality, you'd need a benchtop of lab equipment costing

tens of thousands of dollars. The

Accuwave units are less than 2 cubic

inches each, designed for mass

production and use in networks.

They're low-cost, compact, and

rugged."

"Our entry into the

telecommunications

market has largely

been as a

result of the ATR"

The announcement was particularly

well received, Karlovac recalls,

because it by chance followed an

invited paper from AT&T that singled

out the need for accurate and

ubiquitous wavelength standards as

the number-one issue for optical

networks. "We've had outstanding

response. In fact, we already have a commitment from five companies to go through beta testing with us and

we're working on that right now," he

says, "Of course the road to success and profitability still is a long one

the telecom marketplace has a long

gestation period, and quite a few

things need to happen. From the

business point of view, we intend to

serve the communications R&D

market for the next couple of years, so

these won't be in your home right

away."

But, he says, the Advanced

Technology Program played a key

role in getting them this far: "Our

entry into the telecommunications

market has largely been as a result of

the ATP."

10
NIST

Industrial

Impact

Company,

Diamond Semiconductor Group

Gloucester, Massachusetts

business:

Semiconductor equipment

manufacturer

Number of Employees:

28

The National Institute of

Standards and Technology is an agency of the U.S. Department

of Commerce's Technology

Administration. NIST promotes

U.S. economic growth by working

with industry to develop and apply

technology, measurements,

and standards.

August 1994

"We're liere now only because of the

Advanced Technology Program. We'd

tried all the other avenues —except

for foreign investors." Risky ventures

to replace an established technology

don't fare well in a tight R&D market.

Manny Sieradzki, president of

Diamond Semiconductor Group Inc.

(DSG), has firsthand experience.

Not that he was trying to sell an unwelcome technology. Sieradzki

and his partner, DSG research director

Nicholas White, hoped to develop a new type of ion implantation

machine, one of the primary tools of

the semiconductor industry. The new

machine would be smaller, faster,

cheaper, and more accurate than

existing machines and accommodate

larger wafers—all good things. But it would require a design breakthrough

that was widely believed to be, if not

impossible, certainly very difficult.

And expensive. And times were tight.

Ion implantation is used widely to

tailor the chemical composition of

minute regions in a crystalline wafer

of a substrate, such as silicon, as part

of the process used to create

integrated circuits. The new DSG

machine \%2i high-current implanter,

the type used to implant "source" and

"drain" regions for microscopic

transistors. In what might intuitively

seem like a leap backwards, one of the

principal features of the DSG

machine is that it works on a single

wafer at a time, in contrast to

conventional high-current implanters

that do a batch of 13 to 17 wafers at

once.

Why? In part, explains Sieradzki, the

advantage of his new machine is one

of better process control. The vast

majority of wafer-fabrication steps are done one wafer at a time, so a

single-wafer implanter fits better in

the process stream. You can better

tweak the process for optimal results

working on single wafers. And, were something to go wrong with the

process, a single-wafer machine only

trashes 2i single expensive wafer.

"We're here now only

because of the ATR

We'd tried all the

other avenues—

except for foreign

investors."

But perhaps more importantly, the

existing technology for high-current

ion implanters is being challenged by

the demands of semiconductor

manufacturers for ever larger wafer

sizes. True, the size of individual

features in integrated circuits is

getting smaller and smaller, but the

chips themselves are becoming larger

and larger to accommodate greater

complexity. Take a look at a

state-of-the-art microprocessor. If you

want to maintain the number of chips

per wafer for each new generation,

the wafers have to get bigger.

Which means all the processes have to

be scaled up. Currently, the standard

production wafer is 200 mm in

diameter, but the industry wants to move to much larger 300-mm wafers —about the size of an LP record. To

build a conventional ion-implanting

machine that holds a dozen or more

of these monsters ... whirling around

at about 1,800 rpm ... in a vacuum ...

11
is a very expensive prospect loaded

with engineering problems.

The reason one would try at all is

because it is extremely difficult to take

a high-current ion beam and scan

ituniformly—across the face of a

large semiconductor wafer. The catch

is, you can't conveniently scan the

beam as you would in a TV picture

tube, because at the high beam

current, it would simply tear itself

aoart. So conventional machines hold J. the beam more-or-less steady and

move the wafers, whirling them

around on a disk that slowly moves

under the beam.

DSG's answer was a new design of

ion-beam optics that produces a wide

(about 350 mm), uniform, nearly

parallel ion beam. By simply moving

the wafer through this curtain of ions

at a constant speed, 300-mm and

larger wafers can be processed quickly

and evenly. The new DSG optics make

for a markedly simpler machine, so it

should be much cheaper to build and

maintain than a conventional

ion-implantation machine.

But the concept wasn't an easy sell. "We spent a year and a half looking

for funding, mostly from U.S.

companies," recalls Sieradzki. "The

concept was one that had been talked

about for years," adds White, "but not

everyone believed it was possible. It was definitely high risk. And the

market had been in a slump, so there

wasn't a lot of development money

available anyway."

"Without the

original ATP funding

Into the Diamond

Semiconductor

Group, there

wouldn't have been

enough 'existence

proof for Varlan

to go ahead with

the technology,

particularly since it

was c|^uite high risk."

One option was to look for overseas

investors, but before trying that the

partners decided to apply to the NIST

Advanced Technology Program

(ATP). Their project was one of 21

selected in 1992, and even before the

final papers were signed, the fledgling

company had attracted the attention

of Varian Associates, one of the largest

suppliers of ion-implantation

equipment in the world.

"Winning the ATP award was

absolutely crucial to us," says

Sieradzki. "It's clear to us that

without the ATP we wouldn't have

secured domestic funding for this."

Bruce Thayer, the Varian marketing

manager dealing with DSG, frankly

agrees, "Without the original ATP

funding into the Diamond

Semiconductor Group, there wouldn't

have been enough 'existence proof

for Varian to go ahead with the

technology, particularly since it was

quite high risk."

Under the ATP award, DSG developed

their concept and built a prototype

machine. That was enough for

Varian, which bought a worldwide

license to manufacture, sell, and

service DSG's ion implanter. And the

company kicked in some funds to

help with product development, an

area not covered by the ATP.

DSG now has 28 full- and part-time

employees and is looking to the next

challenge—flat-panel displays. With

its wide product capacity, the DSG

implanter should be an ideal

machine for making the large

integrated devices that are the core of

most flat-panel displays, but it will

require a major marketing effort in

the display industry, which isn't used

to the concept of using ion

implantation. To have picked that as

their first market, says Sieradzki,

would have meant trying to launch a

radically new technology and a

radically new application at the same

time. His advice: "Don't do that." But

now that the basic technology is well

in hand and headed for the

showroom

The partners are understandably

bullish about the company's future,

but in a time of increasing

commercial competition on an

intemational scale. White has a

cautionary moral to add: "We'd be a

Japanese company right now," he

says, "if it weren't for the ATP."

12
NIST

Industrial

Impact

Company:

Eagle-Picher Research Laboratory

Environmental Science & Technology

Department

Miami, Oklahoma

Business:

Develops and manufactures electronic

electro-optic and photonic materials

and devices

Number of Employees:

202

The National Institute of

Standards and Technology is an agency of the U.S. Department

of Commerce's Technology

A^iministration. NIST promotes

U.S. economic growth by working

with industry to develop and apply

technology, measurements,

and standards.

August 1994

Physicist Jan Schetzina knows how to

show-and-tell. In June 1994, at the

end of a technical talk he was

presenting at a meeting on

semiconductor devices at the

University of Colorado, he held up a

little black box, his finger poised on a

button. When he pressed it, a

pencil-thin beam of bright green light

from the box hit the back wall. He

then swept the light like a beacon

across the audience of several

hundred. The next thing Schetzina

remembers is that his ears were filled

with a round of spontaneous applause.

Those gathered at the meeting—the

Institute of Electrical and Electronics

Engineers' Device Research

Conference—knew what that light

signified. It meant that Schetzina of

the North Carolina State University

(NCSU) and his colleagues had

achieved a milestone toward the goal

of making highly controlled

semiconductor crystals that emit

green or blue wavelengths of light.

Schetzina's show-and-tell glory rests

partly on his team's expertise with a

crystal growing technique called

molecular beam epitaxy (MBE),

which allows them to build and vary

crystal structures atomic layer by

atomic layer.

The applause for Schetzina's

demonstration was for more than

skilled MBE work at NCSU. Also

pivotal were a unique supply of

pristine zinc selenide (ZnSe) crystals

from Eagle-Picher Research

Laboratory and what both Schetzina

and Eagle-Picher representatives

describe as a critical assist from the

National Institute of Standards and

Technology (NIST) in the form of an

Advanced Technology Program grant.

There actually is nothing new about

light-emitting diodes (LEDs), which

were the kind of devices Schetzina was

talking about. Nice bright ones have

been shining for years inside CD

players, or from the panels of

consumer electronic products. But no

one yet has made a true green or blue

LED that lasts more than a few

seconds. Those LEDs now marketed as

Also pivotal was

a critical assist

from NIST in the

form of an

Advanced Technology

Program grant.

"green" lack intensity and are

actually a disappointing hue of yellow

green, Schetzina says.

There is no shortage of technological

carrots for green and blue LEDs and

laser diodes, which emit a much

narrower range of wavelengths than

LEDs. For one, their availability

would complete the basic spectrum of

solid-state light-emitting devices and

that could launch a new branch of

the flat-panel display industry for TVs,

computer monitors, control panels,

and electronic games. Even more

important, according to several key

players in the field, is that their

shorter wavelengths can pack more

information than the redder ones now at the heart of optical

communications. Moreover, those

same shorter wavelengths could lead

to data recording and storage systems

with much greater capacities than

today's best. Companies such as 3M,

Xerox, and Sony in Japan, military

13
planners, and academic researchers

have been hot on the trail of this

technology for years.

There have been plenty of dead ends.

Schetzina and many other research

teams around the world had made

green LEDs by depositing Il-VI

semiconductors (so-named because

they are made by mixing and

matching elements from the second

and sixth columns of the Periodic

Table) atop a crystal of gallium

arsenide (GaAs, a III-V compound).

Anyone who has ever tried to make

GaAs-ZnSe combos though has run

into a show-stopping problem—the

devices last only a short time, usually

a few seconds, before their crystal

structures become riddled with lightquenching defects.

The seeds for destruction probably are sown as soon as the first layers of

ZnSe are deposited on the gallium

arsenide since the respective spacing

between the atoms in each layer are

not quite matched. Like a plastic top

forced onto a mismatched deli

container, these differences elicit

strains, which researchers think are

the source of the structural defects

that appear soon after any current

courses into the crystals.

Like other semiconductor researchers,

Schetzina suspected that the only way

to grow durable ZnSe-based LEDs

would be on top of ZnSe crystals, in

which case there would be no mismatch between atomic spacings.

That is a scenario much easier to

imagine than make real. No one had

ever succeeded in growing ZnSe

crystals large enough to offer

commercial promise, Schetzina says.

Until 1991, that is. That is when

"Without the ATR

they would not have

had the incentive

or help that they

needed at a very

critical time...

researchers at Eagle-Picher, led by

Gene Cantwell and William Harsch,

announced that they had come up

with a patented method to grow the

coveted ZnSe crystals. Called seeded

physical vapor transport, the method

involves a heated tube that contains

purified zinc selenide powder whose

atoms boil off and then migrate

toward seed crystals on either end of

the heated tube on which large

pristine crystals then grow. Harsch was confident that he and colleagues

would be able to come up with the

ZnSe crystal that others had given up

on, but he wanted to take the crystal

to the next step of technology

development. So in 1991, Harsch gave

Schetzina a call.

Their subsequent collaboration

already has yielded prototype LEDs

that emit a deep emerald green light,

which is more than 50 times brighter

and more efficient than commercial

yellow-green devices. Recently, the

NCSU/Eagle-Picher team also has

demonstrated bright blue LEDs, says

Schetzina.

The timing of these successes was

crucial. Eagle-Picher's original efforts

to make ZnSe had been funded since

the mid-1980s by a federal agency

that shifted its emphasis entirely to

gallium arsenide substrates in the

early 1990s. The subsequent loss of

government funds for ZnSe research

led company management to

seriously rethink the material's

commercial potential. "1 was told

either to do something with the

technology or to get out of the IZnSe]

business," Harsch recalls. Knowing

"that the technology was too good to

drop, though," the company applied

for support from the Advanced

Technology Program, Harsch says.

In late 1992, Eagle-Picher was

awarded a 3-year ATP award totaling

$1,759,000. "Without the ATP, they

would not have had the incentive or

help that they needed at a very critical

time when they were about to make

internal decisions," Schetzina says.

Adds Harsch: "It gave our program

credibility in the minds of our

corporate people." The award also

enabled the company to greatly

leverage its own investment for a

high-risk project with potentially high

payoffs, just what ATP awards are

chartered to do.

"This is tuming into a textbook case

of technology transfer," says Harsch.

Since the award was granted, the

Eagle-Picher group has been able to

improve their success rate at growing

usable ZnSe crystals from intermittent

to nearly 100 percent, he says. By the

fall of 1994, they expect to receive a

production MBE system exactly like

the one Schetzina's group uses at NCSU and the company plans to hire

some graduates from Schetzina's lab. The hardware purchase was part of

the ATP agreement. Says Harsch:

"By the end of the year, we could be

selling the world's brightest and most

durable green LEDs."

14
NIST

Industrial

Impact

Company:

GenPharm International

Mountain View, California

business:

Developers of medically oriented

biotechnology tools and

products

Number of Employees:

90

!

The National Institute of

St^ndands and Technology is an agent^ of the U.S. Department

of Commerce's Technology

Administration. NIST promotes

U.S. economic grov/th by working

with industry to develop and apply

technology, measurements,

and standards.

July 1994

So far biotechnology has been a field

of tremendous commercial promise,

steep capital investment, sporadic

near-term payoff, and risky long-terai

returns. For many small startup

companies, these factors combine to make a precarious business context in

which they must conduct expensive

R&D in extremely competitive areas,

while limiting the resources they

commit to avoid bankruptcy before

they can get a product out their door.

In a bid to improve its own

competitive position and likelihood of

survival, GenPharm Intemational, a young biotechnology company based

in Mountain View, Calif., and

specializing in so-called transgenic

technology, applied for govemment

support from the Advanced

Technology Program (ATP) of the

Department of Commerce. The

company knew the ATP program,

begun in 1990, is designed to help

U.S. companies develop higher risk,

higher payoff technologies that they

otherwise would not be able to afford

or would have to put on hold

indefinitely.

Both of GenPharm's proposals, one in

1992 and another in 1993, got

upwardly directed thumbs from

program managers and reviewers at

the National Institute of Standards

and Technology (NIST), which

manages the ATP. To GenPhamn that

means nearly $4 million of additional

R&D funds through 1996. "This has

enabled us to increase our attention

and focus resources on important

areas that we would have been unable

to pursue," says David Winter,

president and chief operating officer

of GenPharm's U.S. arm where the

ATP-supported work is being done.

The company received its first ATP

award to develop a means to transfer

larger genes than had previously been

possible from humans into another

organism such as a mouse. The goal

is to develop a versatile technique for

creating transgenic mice that could

serve both as model biological

systems for studying human

diseases and as tools for creating

"This has enabled

us to increase

our attention and

focus resources

on important

areas that we

would have been

unable to pursue."

pharmaceutical agents, such as

antibodies, to fight specific diseases.

The company's proposed approach was to first incorporate large strips of

DNA into versatile gene shuttles

known as yeast artificial

chromosomes (YACs), which

researchers at GenPharm and

elsewhere already had shown are

suitable for cloning much larger

genes than other methods. The

second step was to transfer the YAC

gene shuttle into an animal such as a mouse whose cells, researchers hoped,

would take up the gene and

manufacture the biologically

important protein it encodes.

Before the summer of 1993,

GenPharm researchers had reached one of their technical milestones with an unexpected swiftness made

possible in large part because of the

15
ATP award, Winter says. One big boost

from tlie money, he says, came from

tiie additional talented scientists,

including a yeast geneticist, that the

company was able to hire. In a November 1993 issue of the

Proceedings ofthe National

Academy ofSciences, the researchers

reported that they had transferred the

largest piece of DNA ever between

organisms, in this case between a human and a mouse.

This was not just any piece of DNA

either. It harbored a gene encoding a

protein known as amyloid precursor

protein (APP), which other

researchers have implicated in

Alzheimer's disease, though APP has

not yet been convicted of causing the

brain/mind degenerating disease that

affects millions of people worldwide.

"We didn't think it would work

[because the APP gene was so much

bigger than any previously transferred

gene] , but since we were developing

the method, we decided to try a

relevant dream," Winter says.

With that success, biomedical

researchers now have access to a line

of mice whose brain cells harbor

copies of human APP. For its part,

GenPharm has a product to sell as it

strives to become a biotech company

that runs in the black. Of course.

One b\q boost from

the money, he says,

came from the

additional talented

scientists, including

a yeast geneticist,

that the company

was able to hire.

reminders of the risks in this business

are never hard to find. None of the

transgenic mice created so far have

shown signs of a mouse version of

Alzheimer's disease, so it is too early

to say how much the animals can

reveal about the human disease or how big a product line these

transgenic mice might spawn. The

lessons leamed, however, should open

doors to many more transgenic

products.

GenPharm leamed of its second ATP

award the same month that their

PMS" paper appeared. The goal of this

project is to develop and establish a

standard transgenic model system

capable of emulating many

gene-based human diseases,

including arthritis, multiple sclerosis,

diabetes, AIDS, and certain cancers. The pivotal challenge is to create

transgenic mice that lack their usual

immunity mechanisms, yet can

assimilate various tissues of human

origin into their own body systems.

Since the normal immunity-guided

rejection processes would not be

active, the modified animals could

serve as more realistic models for

researchers trying to uncover the

detailed molecular biology

underlying these diseases.

In an April 1994 issue of the joumal

Nature, GenPharm researchers

reported progress toward that goal.

The paper describes how they

incorporated an array of human

immune-system genes, responsible for

generating repertoires of antibodies,

into immunosuppressed mice, which

manufactured fully human

antibodies. The researchers think the

work could lead to a source of human

antibodies designed to inactivate

specific pathogens. Federal support

for that particular project came from

the National Institutes of Health. With

the ATP grant, the challenge now is to leam how to generalize the technique

so the mice can host many types of

human cells and tissues. "What is so

beautiful about the ATP is that you

can spend time standardizing your

methods and understanding what is

going on," Winter notes. And that is

the stuff from which strong

companies are made.

16
NIST

Induetrial

Impact

Company,

National Center for Manufacturing

Sciences

AlliedSignal Inc. AT&T

International Business Machines

Corporation

Texas Instruments Inc.

United Technologies/

Hamilton Standard Corporation

Sandia National Laboratories,

U.S. Department of Energy

business:

Suppliers, makers, and users of

printed-wiring boards (PWBs)

The National Institute of

5tanda>rls an^l Technology is an agency of the U.S. Department

of Commerce's Technology

Administration. NIST promotes

U.S. economic qrowth by working

with industry to develop and apply

technology, measurements,

and standards.

August 1994

Printed-wiring boards (PWBs) lack

the glamour and romance of

advanced microprocessors, flat-panel

displays, or ultrahigh-density

memory systems, but that doesn't

mean they're unimportant.

Perforated with tiny plated holes,

embroidered with a lacework of

copper lines, these thin composite

boards form the backbone and

nervous system of virtually every

electronic product. In 1991, the world

market for PWBs was estimated at

$19 billion.

It is a market that U.S. companies

have been losing. Ten years ago, the

U.S. share of the PWB market was

estimated at 42 percent. By 1991,

it had fallen to 27 percent. Many

relatively small firms are

involved—of the estimated 725

independent PWB companies in the

United States (excluding captive

producers working for large

manufacturers), roughly 80 percent

have annual sales under $5 million.

To date, PWB technology has kept

pace with the increasing complexity

and speed of electronic devices, but it

is approaching fundamental limits in

both materials and processes. Because

of the market size, relatively minor

improvements in materials or manufacturing processes can result

in sizable savings for the entire

industry. By solving technology

challenges, U.S. industry can rebuild

its position in the PWB market —indeed, capture the high end.

With these thoughts in mind, the

National Center for Manufacturing

Sciences (NCMS) in Ann Arbor, Mich.,

assembled a team of member

companies in 1990 to attack a broad

array of fundamental technical issues

in PWB manufacture with support

from the NIST Advanced Technology

Program (ATP). Now, in the last half

of the 5-year project, member

companies that include AlliedSignal,

Inc.; AT&T; IBM; Texas Instruments;

and United Technologies/Hamilton

Standard Corp. already are benefiting.

In the last half

of the 5-year

project, member

companies already

are benefiting.

The research plan presented to the

ATP envisioned a $28 million effort,

more than half of which is coming

from the private-sector partners. The

Energy Department's Sandia National

Laboratories later joined the venture,

contributing $5.2 million.

Working from an initial industry

study to determine just what PWB

customers needed, the joint venture

tackled a variety of often subtle

problems. Where insulation requires

two or three sheets of glass epoxy to be

laminated together to get the desired

thickness, for example, a couple of

dollars could be saved on every sheet

simply by using one thick sheet in

place of two or three thin sheets. But can you do that and maintain the

exacting tolerances required for the

best PC boards? Some data suggest

that drills tend to go askew when

boring through thicker sheets, and

the surface finish of thick materials

tends to be rougher, which might

interfere with the copper plating steps.

For that matter, would thicker

17
materials have the necessary

dimensional stability? An evaluated

database of numerous highperformance laminates and

mathematical models to predict key

technical issues—the dimensional

stability of various laminates and the

reliability of copper connections

plated through holes—are three early

achievements of the materials team.

But in addition to any benefits from

the research program, participants in

the NCMS/ATP project report that

simple cooperation reaps substantial

rewards. A study conducted in 1993

found that after 2 years, the project

already had saved the participants

about $13.5 million simply by

avoiding redundant research and

sharing facilities and information.

Bob Holmes, a research manager for

AT&T noted, "We were quite insular,

working in a large company, and

weren't really aware of what other

people in the industry were doing

about this. The NCMS/ATP project

opened a lot of windows and got us

talking to a lot of other people. We

saw that they had a lot of the same

problems and sometimes had new

insights on how to solve them."

Lee Parker, also with AT&T, worked

on imidazole, an organic

"solderability" preservative (OSP), as an inexpensive way to protect bare

copper leads on a PWB from oxidizing

without the use of tin-lead solder, an

environmental hazard. He found that

working with the NCMS/ATP project

benefited his work in two ways. "One,

After 2 years,

the project already

had saved the

participants about

$13.5 million.

they went a long way toward making

OSPs acceptable in the industry.

Texas Instruments (TI), in particular,

would present results of solderability

studies using imidazole at

conferences and impress people with

the product. Two, the other members

of the project helped us understand

technically what was going on with

the coating. As a result, imidazole is

saving AT&T millions of dollars a

year, and we now are working with

Lea Ronal, a chemical supplier for

the electronics industry, to market it

intemationally. The NCMS/ATP effort was very important in getting this to market so quickly."

TI's Foster Gray has similar stories.

Tools developed by the PWB

surface-finish team, he says, allowed

TI to halve the solder defect rate on

boards for the HARM missile.

Materials researchers with the PWB

project also demonstrated that a

board's coefficient of thermal

expansion—a measure of

dimensional stability—^varied

depending on where the board was

cut from the original four-by-eight

sheet. "It's a result none of us

expected. Now that we know it's

happening, we can control for it and

get better process control overall."

Another PWB team, says Gray, tumed

up a useful negative result. The PWB

industry was seriously considering an

in-process test for gauging the

solderability of boards, until the PWB

team demonstrated that the technique

had too much variation to be an

accurate predictor of solderability.

"That's difficult to quantify," observes

Gray. "But you know it saved the

whole industry a great deal of time

and money that we would have spent

putting in this equipment and trying

to use it."

Participation in the PWB effort also

gave TI access to a PWB test pattern

developed by AT&T for monitoring

production lines, according to Gray.

"In the days gone by, we'd have had

to develop that ourselves, instead we

could use the AT&T test. We saved a

cool million dollars right there."

In fact, says Tom Newton, manager of

advanced programs for AlliedSignal

Laminate Systems, industrial

cooperation may be one of the biggest

single advances to come out of the

NCMS/ATP project. "The consortium

concept is not natural in our

industry," says Newton. "It takes a

consortium-type effort of almost

constant contact, working on specific

problems, for people in our industry

to really start talking. To get in there,

do hands-on work together, that

shows commitment. It was tough to do that, given our conceptions of how

the PWB industry did business. The

NCMS/ATP project created a structure

to make it happen."

Could it have happened without the

impetus from the ATP? "Well, I don't

know," says TI's Gray. "But no one

ever worked it out until they came

along."

16
NIST

Induatrial

Impact

Company.

Nonvolatile Electronics Inc.

Plymouth, Minnesota

Business:

Designs and manufactures memory

and sensor devices using

proprietary magnetic materials

Number of Employees;

23

The National Institute of

Standands and Technology is an agency of the U.S. Department

of Commerce's Technology

Administration. NIST promotes

U.S. economic groivth by working

with industry to develop and apply

technology, measurements,

and standards.

August 1994

In 1989, after a quarter century of

work in the secure setting of major

corporations, James Daughton took a

leap into the unknown. In March of

that year, his start-up company.

Nonvolatile Electronics Inc., became

a legal reality awaiting a human

contingent to give it life. Three

months later, Daughton left his post

as vice president of Honeywell's

Corporate Solid State Laboratory to

lead NVE into the raging waters on

which new startups sink or swim.

For Daughton, the decision to create NVE was a culmination of decades of

work on magnetic materials, which

he began as a graduate student in the

early 1960s, and that remained a prominent theme throughout his

subsequent work in electronics and

sensor technology at IBM and then

Honeywell. While he was at Honeywell

he co-invented a computer memory

technology—called magnetoresistive

random access memory

(MRAM)—that became the seed of

NVE, which now licenses MRAM

technology from Honeywell.

MRAM is a "nonvolatile" type of

computer memory; it retains data

even after a computer's power is tumed off. NVE has been developing a

range of memory and sensor products

that marry MRAM components with

more standard silicon-based circuitry.

The company relies on established

"chip foundries" to make the circuits;

NVE engineers then pattern MRAM

components onto the chips out of

magnetic, insulating, and conducting

materials.

Daughton is quick to admit that NVE

has had its ups and downs. Having

skirted ruin in its first 2 years, it has

only begun the process of establishing

a track record. In 1994, NVE even began selling a few copies of its first commercial product—a magnetic

field sensor. Daughton hopes the

sensor will infiltrate big markets,

including anti-lock brake systems,

pacemaker technology, and machine

tool controls.

With big-name companies courting

NVE and its technologies, and product

revenue beginning to trickle in.

"Our company would

not exist if it

hadn't been for

our ATP award."

Daughton sees reason for optimism.

He says so with a sense of relief. From

the get-go, the company has been

surviving on govemment contracts

and grants, including a

cost-matching award of more than

$1.7 million from the Advanced

Technology Program, which is managed by the National Institute of

Standards and Technology (NIST).

"Our company would not exist if it

hadn't been for our ATP award,"

which expired in the spring of 1994,

Daughton says.

Besides helping the company expand

and maintain a staff of more than

20 skilled researchers, the ATP

award hastened several specific

technological developments,

Daughton says. "We came up with

new architectures that enabled us to

shrink the size [of MRAM chips]

by at least 50 percent ... and we

learned all kinds of techniques to

19
overcome limitations in product

reproducibility."

Ironically, the first NVE product to

enter the marketplace, the so-called

giant magnetoresistance (GMR)

bridge sensor, is an unexpected

spin-off of their MRAM development.

These magnetic field sensors are

based on a new type of thin-film

material, first reported in 1988 by

French researchers, whose

sandwich-like structure comprises

one or more altemating layers of

magnetic and non-magnetic

materials. The collective resistance

changes dramatically in the presence

of a magnetic field, which explains

why the property is called giant

magnetoresistance. NVE engineers

happened onto a method of making

their own GMR materials during

efforts to improve the ability of their

MRAM material to retain data.

The ATP

award hastened

several specific

technological

developments.

In addition to the ATP award,

Daughton credits several NIST

researchers with providing pivotal

assistance ever since NVE was

incorporated. One of them, surface

scientist William Egelhoff, "has been

there for us from the beginning, and

still is," Daughton says. In August

1994, NVE researcher Eugene Chen

wrote a letter of gratitude to Egelhoff

for a recent technical tip to deposit a

thin layer of "transition" oxide

underneath their GMR material

(a multilayer structure involving

nickel, iron, and cobalt), an exercise

that resulted in record-level responses

of the GMR material to a magnetic

field. "John Unguris," another NIST

researcher, "helped us solve a yield

problem," Daughton adds. The key

here was data obtained using a

specialized microscope that revealed

the materials' microscopic magnetic

structure responsible for its magnetic

behavior. Yet a third assist came from

John Moreland's group at NIST's

Boulder facility. There, data from a

magnetic-force microscope helped

map out the details of the GMR

materials' "magnetic microscopes."

"We now are healthy," Daughton says

of his company. He is well aware that

significant revenue from products

remains a goal, for NVE, not yet a fact

of business life. Meeting that goal, not

govemment contracts, will soon become the basis of NVE's health.

20
NIST

Industrial

Impact

Company.

SDL Inc. San Jose, California

Business:

Producer of liigh-power

semiconductor lasers and

fiber optic components

Number of Employees:

180

Company:

Xerox Corporation

Palo Alto Research Center

Palo Alto, Califomia

Business:

Manufacturer of document

processing technologies

Number of Employees:

300

The National Institute of

Standards and Technolo^ is an agency of the U.S. Department

of Commerce's Technology

Administration. NIST promotes

U.S. economic growth by working

with industry to develop and apply

technology, measurements,

and standards.

February 1994

There are few substitutes for an

annual infusion of, say, $1,400,000

for 5 years to ratchet up the research

and development throttle. That is what happened to SDL Inc. and the

Xerox Corp. beginning in September

1992, when their joint proposal to the

Advanced Technology Program (ATP)

for work on visible diode lasers and

optical fiber components met with

approval from a review panel at the

National Institute of Standards and

Technology (NIST), which runs the

program for the Department of

Commerce.

In less than 2 years since the ATP

award, which is designed to support

development of high-risk

technologies that might enhance and

spawn many other technologies, SDL

has had three unexpectedly near-term

spin-offs—new semiconductor-based

laser products with wide-ranging

applications that are now on the

market, says Donald R. Scifres, SDL's

president and CEO. The three

products are laser diodes that emit red

light directly at various powers

without requiring a second laser for

excitation, which is usually needed

for high-power lasers. The company

also is pushing forward to develop

laser systems that can emit green and

blue light, a much tougher technical

challenge that is expected to open

many more technological doors.

In the nearer term, applications for

the red-laser products could range

from surgery and an emerging

light-based tumor treatment called

photodynamic therapy to new

laser-based cutting tools for

manufacturers to high-speed color

printing. It is that last possibility that

provided the original impetus for SDL

to join with Xerox Corp. and give the

ATP a shot, and why green and blue

lasers remain at the top of the to-do

list. "We want to eventually use these

types of lasers in high-speed color

printing operations," says Neville

Council, director of the electronic

materials lab at Xerox's Palo Alto

Research Center.

The semiconductor laser market is as

competitive as it gets. "If you don't

accelerate your development, you fall

behind your competition," Scifres

says. The competition is getting stiffer now as high-technology firms around

the world race for some of the newest

trophies in the arena of optical

components—those green and blue

lasers. Together with the more mature

technology of red lasers, these open

In less than

2 years since the

ATP award,

SDL has had

three unexpectedly

near-term

spin-offs.

up paths to higher capacity

communications systems, new color

displays, medical tools, and many

other products.

The ATP awards are supposed to smooth the path from laboratory to

marketplace and to post higher speed

limits along the way. The program is

designed so companies can leverage

their own investment and

commitment to higher risk, higher

payoff technologies with partial

support from the government. In the

21
case of SDL and Xerox, the ATP ideal

seems to be working. Says Connell:

"We now can get wliere we want to go

twice as quickly." Secondly, he adds,

the ATP competition "provided

impetus to form an alliance with SDL

and Stanford University," which is

also contributing to the research

effort. Scifres also credits the ATP

award with strengthening his

company's competitive position. "We

were in catch-up mode and I think we

have caught up and surpassed Europe

and Japan," he says.

Scifres admits that his company

probably would have developed one of

the recently commercialized lasers

without the ATP award.

As for the other

two products,

"they might never

have happened

without the

ATP award

r

Progress, however, would likely have

been sluggish at best. As the funding

started coming through, SDL hired

four new people to their staff of 180,

and as orders for the spin-off products

came in, they hired even more for

their production lines. As for the other

two products, he says "they might

never have happened without the ATP

award."

Moreover, the three products are pure

bonus for SDL since high-power lasers

for printing are in the bull's-eye for

the SDL/Xerox alliance. No

complaints on this score, especially

because the spin-offs keep spinning.

In a letter last December to NIST

Director Arati Prabhakar, Scifres

noted that another company was

considering one of these spin-off

lasers for its own products. No final

word on that yet, but if an order is

placed, Scifres noted in the letter, "it would represent SDL's highest volume

order."

22
NIST

Indu6trial

Impact

Company:

X-Ray Optical Systems Inc.

Albany, New York

business:

Start-up company specializing in

lenses that focus X-rays and neutrons

into beams for use in research,

medical imaging and treatment, and

manufacturing.

Number of Employees:

8

The National Institute of

SXandarAe and Technology is an agency of the U.S. Department

of Commerce's Technology

Administration. NIST promotes

U.S. economic growth by working

with industry to develop and apply

technology, measurements,

and standards.

February 1994

If Lilliputians in the high-technology

arena think big enough, they can get

a shot at the big time. Just ask David

Gibson, president of X-Ray Optical

Systems Inc., and one of eight

employees at the 3-year-old start-up

in Albany, N.Y. The company is not

out of the woods yet, Gibson says, but

the path ahead looks downright

inviting, in large part because of new

types of collaborations with the

federal research infrastructure.

The prime movers of the company

are two physicists—David Gibson's

father, Walter Gibson of the State

University of New York at Albany, and

Muradin Kumakhov of the I.V.

Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy

in Moscow. They had known each

other for decades as professional peers

and collaborators. Kumakhov and

colleagues in Russia had been finding

that arrays of tiny glass capillaries,

when carefully bundled, seemed

capable of focusing X-rays and

neutrons.

Most scientists had long assumed

that the ability to focus these types of

radiation was a great idea that the

Muse of Physics would make both

irresistible and unreachable. That

ability could mean everything from

uniquely fine probes into the

structure of matter to more powerful

medical treatments to the means

for making next-generation

microprocessors. But lens materials

mostly absorb, rather than transmit

these types of radiation, and can

hardly bend whatever radiation does

get through.

Kumakhov made an end run around

this seeming impasse. By making tiny

glass capillaries with smooth interiors

that bend gradually. X-rays and

neutrons entering them would

repeatedly graze off the walls like a

stone skipping on water. When

bundled, such tubes could take a

diverging weakening beam of X-rays

or neutrons emanating from a

radiation source and redirect them

into parallel beams or onto small

intense spots.

Gibson senior and Kumakhov were

themselves convinced that the lenses

had astounding scientific and

technological potential. Kumakhov

and Russian colleagues had done

some experiments with prototype

lenses that supported the concept. To

go farther at more than a snail's pace,

though, they had to convince other

scientists in the United States that

That ability could

mean anything and

everything from

unic^uely fine

probes into the

structure of matter

to more powerful

medical treatments

to the means

for making

next-generation

microprocessors.

they were onto something, and they

had to find financial support for

development.

To build an organization, they

recruited David Gibson, an MIT

educated mechanical engineer and

business manager. He knew that

23
nothing would happen unless

external backing could be gotten and

that the technology was too green to

attract venture capital. So in the

summer of 1990 when X-Ray Optical

Systems (XOS) was being

incorporated, he came across an

article that mentioned the then

fledgling Advanced Technology

Program, administered by NIST. He

read carefully. "My gut told me that

this was a program designed for us,"

he recalls. "The Kumakhov lens was a

high-risk nascent technology whose

commercial payoff seemed very

promising but that needed further

development, just the kind of thing

the ATP was created to support."

In 1991, they received word that their

subsequent application for an ATP

award had failed. Gibson surmises

that the verdict followed naturally

since the company did not yet have an infrastructure and its business

strategy was incomplete. But the ATP

experience had primed him to other

possibilities in the govemment. The

same year, XOS applied for and won

two of the Department of Energy's

Small Business Innovative Research

grants. The momentum has only

been building since.

A cmcial part of that motion began

also in early 1991 when the

three-man company went on a

15-stop, cross-country dog-and-pony

show to govemment labs equipped

with accelerators, industrial users of

X-rays, and academicians. Though

they fielded some flak for their

marketing bravado, they also tumed

some heads, including ones at NIST.

The series of

QOverr\rr\ent grants

and collaborations

have provided XOS

with access to

ec^uipment and

experts tailor made

to assess, develop,

and validate the new

technology.

One payoff came through in

December 1991, when XOS signed a Cooperative Research and

Development Agreement (CRADA)

with NIST. The goal of the CRADA is

to develop neutron lenses that could

help NIST in its mission of providing

ever more accurate measurement

capabilities for industry while helping

XOS in its commercialization

mission. A few months later, the

company learned that its second try

for an ATP had met with success and

would receive $1,900,000 from the

govemment in its part of a

cost-sharing R&D agreement, in

which XOS would have to come up

with $350,000 for indirect costs. In

June, just as the ATP money started

coming in, the company began

working with NIST researchers on

another project to develop lenses that

could form parallel beams of X-rays.

In September of 1993, XOS began

work on another collaboration with

NIST in which it would provide lenses

to NIST researchers for real world

microanalysis of samples. In

exchange, XOS would learn about

what was necessary for the optics to be

successful in that use.

In December 1993, as a result of

progress made during the CRADA,

XOS shipped its first commercial lens

to a very familiar customer, scientists

at NIST's research reactor. It has

exceeded expectations in preliminary

tests, notes NIST research chemist

Gregory Downing, who expects the

lens to dramatically enhance NIST's

analysis abilities and services as well

as its collaborative efforts with other

U.S. companies including Intel,

CIDTEC, Westinghouse, Texas

Instruments, and a consortium of

companies developing synthetic

diamond products.

The series of govemment grants and

collaborations have provided XOS

with access to equipment and experts

tailor made to assess, develop, and

validate the new technology, David

Gibson says. "It has allowed us to

develop applications that we would

otherwise not have addressed," he

adds. The ATP award and NIST

technical capabilities also enabled

XOS to act like a bigger company with

more resources and personnel without

actually having to invest in these

before the technical risks were

overcome. That hurdle trips up many

start ups. The ATP award had an

important spinoff too. When news got

out that XOS had been a winner in

their second ATP competition, the

company was finally able to convince

private investors that the risk was

reasonable. The foundations for

success seem to be in place, Gibson

says. XOS may not be in Lilliput for

long.

24
Manufacturing

Extension

Partnership

Impacts

25
II
NIST

Industrial

Impact

Company:

Clipper Diamond Tool Co. Inc. Long Island City, New York

business:

Manufacturer of precision

superabrasive and diamond cutting

tools and grinding wheels

Number of Employees:

38

i

I

The National Institute of

Standards and Technology is an agency of the U.S. Department

of Commerce's Technology

Administration. NIST promotes

U.S. economic growth by working

with industry to develop and apply

technology, measurements,

and standards.

June 1994

Like the gem used in its product, the

future once again looks bright and

shiny for the Clipper Diamond Tool

Co. Inc. This was not the case 3 years

ago when company founder and

president Joseph Klipper realized

drastic moves were needed or the

50-year-old company would have to

close its doors.

But after hooking up with the NIST

New York Manufacturing Extension

Partnership (MEP), the company has

made a dramatic tumaround,

improving productivity and morale

and regaining customers.

When Klipper came to the United

States from Belgium in 1940, he

planned to set up a small

manufacturing operation to provide

gems for the jewelry industry.

However, with America's growing

involvement in World War II, he

realized that both he and his newly

adopted country could benefit if the

company manufactured something

more utilitarian than omamental.

He tumed his expertise to developing

tools using industrial-grade

diamonds to shape, size, and grind

metal parts used for precision

machining. During the war and for

the next 40 years or so, business was

good for the company. Sales were

brisk, and the company counted

among its customers numerous

manufacturers such as Pratt &

Whitney, Ford, and Chrysler.

But, during the 1980s things took a downtum. Rent for the

Manhattan-based company was

skyrocketing, and customers were tuming to competitors in Japan and

Germany.

"It's a story we hear quite a lot," says

Phil Massaro, a field engineer with

the New York MEP Industrial

Technology Assistance Corp. (ITAC).

"Mr. Klipper and others in the

company recognized they were

behind the times, that the company

had stagnated, but they were not quite

sure what steps to take to modemize."

After hooking up

with the NIST

New York

Manufacturing

Extension

f^rtnership, the

company has made

a dramatic

turnaround,

improving

productivity and

morale and regaining

customers.

Massaro worked with Klipper,

company vice-president Steve

Grossman, and others to find a wide

range of city and state grant programs

to help the company upgrade and

modemize its operations. Most of the

grants were matched with company

funds, says Massaro.

For example, he says, "We worked

with them to access a program offered

by New York City that will help offset

costs of moving if a company

relocates within the city." Moving to a new facility in Queens not only

reduced rent costs but set the stage for

the next step, a total reorganization.

27
With the expert advice of Les James, an engineering consultant hired with

New York MEP's assistance, a new

modem layout was designed and the

company began to automate both its

manufacturing and office operations.

"For example, we installed

computer-aided design and

manufacturing equipment and an

automated accounting and inventory

control system. Clipper employees

now can electronically transfer

drawings directly to customers, and

soon, customers will have direct

access to other data, such as

information conceming purchase

orders and invoices," says James.

Also, with New York state grants

facilitated by ITAC, James set up

employee training programs in

subjects such as statistical process

control, quality management, and

English-As-a-Second-Language.

"Our company has

been revitalized,"

says Klipper. "We are

once again able to

compete both here

in the United States

and around the

world."

The changes have resulted in marked

improvements. For example, just

6 months after implementing a

quality improvement program,

Clipper eamed Ford Motor Co.'s

Q-101 rating—its highest quality

ranking for vendors.

Statistics down the line look good:

For 1992 and 1993, productivity was up 3 to 4 percent. Ninety-eight

percent of all orders are sent out

within 2 weeks, up from 90 percent.

Cycle time for some products has been

shortened to 7 days. Prior to the

improvements, the shortest cycle time was 28 days. In addition, the number

of orders leaving the factory on time

has improved by 20 percent. The

company currently exports 15 to 20 percent of its products to Europe,

South America, Israel, and Mexico

and hopes to increase that number as

well. "The task before us now is to

capture the opportunity for grovi^h

that the renewed market interest has

offered," says Grossman.

"Our company has been revitalized,"

says Klipper. "We are once again able

to compete both here in the United

States and around the world. If it had

not been for this help, Clipper

Diamond Tool would not be around

today," he says.

2&
NIST

Indu6trial

Impact

Company,

Dee Inc.

Crookston, Minnesota

Bue'meee

Aluminum foundry and machining

company

Number of Employees:

185

The National Institute of

Standards and Technology is

an agency of the U.S. Department

of Commerce's Technology

Administration. NIST promotes

U.S. economic growl^h by working

with industry to develop and apply

tec\nno\oq^, measurements,

and standards.

August 1994

As an aluminum foundry and

machining company, Dee Inc. makes

parts for snowmobiles, personal

watercraft, oil and air filtration

equipment, and other products. The

company employs 185 and has

annual sales of more than $8 million.

Even though Dee Inc. increased sales

between 1991 and 1992, the company

wasn't seeing a corresponding

relationship in profitability,

according to company President Jim

Ellinger. At the same time. Dee

recognized the need to emphasize

process controls beyond meeting its

shipping goals.

Dee manufactures aluminum-alloy,

sand- and permanent-mold castings.

In addition. Dee offers machining

and engineering services, which

account for almost one-third of sales. Some of Dee's products ultimately are

used by John Deere, Caterpillar and

Ford—companies that, as part of

their quality improvement processes,

have set stringent standards for their

suppliers to meet.

"That got us to look at what being a

qualified supplier really means,"

Ellinger says. Dee decided it needed

more control over its processes and

requested a needs analysis by the

NIST Upper Midwest Manufacturing

Technology Center (UMMTC),

managed by Minnesota Technology.

The review provided an operational

"snapshot" of Dee and pointed to some steps the company might take to

improve things.

As a result, UMMTC assisted Dee in

choosing and buying manufacturing

software and management

information system (MIS) software

and hardware, in establishing a

cost-based pricing system, and in

securing the services of a metallurgist

to help the company refine its foundry

processes.

The most important step Dee took,

Ellinger says, was to initiate a "Total

Quality" philosophy stressing

employee empowerment. Dee had

discovered that its decision making

was top-down. "That's not the

future," Ellinger says. "So we

embarked on a path to see that trend

reversed."

Dee decided it

needed more

control over its

processes and

rec^uested a needs

analysis by the

NIST Upper Midwest

Manufacturing

Technology Center

(UMMTC).

Through the UMMTC, Dee found a

facilitator to conduct on-site

employee training to open up lines of

communication. As a result, "we saw

the evolution of the team approach,"

Ellinger says. It's an approach that

Dee successfully tested when it implemented a management

information system.

"If our people are going to be

empowered to set goals and standards,

they're definitely going to need

information," Ellinger says. So Dee

bought bar-coding hardware and

software that provides "real-time"

information on what's happening in

29
the plant. More importantly, Ellinger

says, "the people that selected the new

(system) are the people using it."

As a result of employee involvement,

"worker frustration has notably

diminished," Ellinger says. "We're

also seeing increased efficiency and

reduced scrap."

Of the NIST center's role, Ellinger

says, "They bolstered the knowledge

we already had. They also helped us

in terms of technical expertise, in

finding a facilitator, and in finding a

metallurgical engineer. They

"... The NIST center

provided an

outside opinion ae

to our weakneeeee

and strengths...

provided an outside opinion as to our

weaknesses and strengths, which

offered a reinforcement for directions

we were interested in taking."

As a result of its improvements, Dee's

sales have increased and the company

is developing new markets. In

addition, the company has reduced

both foundry and machining set-up

times. Ellinger says the company is now achieving the type of profitability

it needs to stay competitive for the

future. Subsequently, employment

has increased from an average of 103

in 1991, to 169 in 1992. Most

importantly, Ellinger says, Dee is more competitive. "If you're more

efficient and make a more

value-added product, your potential

for gaining more market share

increases."

30
NIST

Induetrial

Impact

Company.

HJE Co. Inc.

Watervliet, New York

Bue'meee:

Manufacturer of gas atomization

systems and metal powders

Number of Employees:

4

The National Institute of

Standards and Techno\og^ is an agency of tlie U.S. Department

of Commerce's Teclinology

Admlnletration. NI6T promotes

U.S. economic growth by working

with industry to develop and apply

technology, measurements,

and standansis.

June 1994

As one of only four companies of its

kind in the world, and the only one in

the United States, HJE Co. Inc. is a big

fish in a very, very small pond. And

company president Joe Strauss likes it

that way.

Strauss's company manufactures gas

atomization systems specially

designed to produce ultrafine metal

powders from molten metal. These

powders are used, for example, in

solder and braze pastes and dental

alloys. The particles also are used to

coat base metal such as jet turbine

blades. HJE also produces and sells

the metal powders.

HJE is now a thriving business with

sales in the United States, Europe,

Asia, and the Middle East. But it

started almost as a hobby, says

Strauss, and may not have developed

at all without some assistance from

the NIST New York Manufacturing

Extension Partnership (MEP).

A materials engineer with a Ph.D.

from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute,

Strauss first seriously considered the

gas atomization technology as a money-making venture after

attending a seminar in 1987

and realizing that no one was

commercializing it. "Many people,

including myself, were interested in

the 'gee whiz' aspect of turning liquid

metal into a powder as fine as talcum

powder. But very few people were

manufacturing equipment that could

do this or exploring ways to use the

powder," says Strauss.

Although still a student at the time,

the idea stuck and eventually Strauss

started designing equipment to

produce very fine powder. In

particular, he had an idea for a

special nozzle design that can handle

high temperatures and a very reliable

control system.

But he was having difficulty

translating what was in his head to mechanical drawings that could be

understood by a parts manufacturer.

"I was spending lots of time, money,

and energy and still not getting it

quite right," he says.

What he found was

a Qo\d mine of

manufacturing

ec^uipment, ideas,

and expertise.

After struggling for several months,

he eventually heard about the NIST

New York MEP. "I wasn't quite sure what they had to offer and, to be

honest, if I had found a good drafting

shop along the way I probably never would have made it to their door,"

says Strauss.

But he did, and what he found was

a gold mine of manufacturing

equipment, ideas, and expertise.

"I was like a kid in a candy store,"

says Strauss.

The NIST New York MEP and its

Manufacturing Technology Resource

Facility (MTRF) provided Strauss the

opportunity to leam about modem

manufacturing technology,

explore "hands-on" a variety of

computer-aided design and

manufacturing equipment and

software, and get tips from experts.

"When Joe first came to us he had lots

of good ideas and some sketches and

rough drawings," says Sam

31
Chiappone, manager of the MTRF.

"But he did not have the basic set of

blueprints that he needed to get parts

machined," he says.

Chiappone and others at the MTRF

did more than help Strauss figure out

how to design the equipment he

needed. "They also made sure that

what I was designing was practical to

manufacture and helped me find

machine shops to make the parts,"

says Strauss.

Strauss spent about 6 months at the

MTRF and eventually purchased his

own computer-aided design and

manufacturing equipment and

software. "The people at the MTRF

were extremely helpful and patient,"

he says. "With the information I

gained I was able to dramatically

"The people at

the MTRF were

extremely helpful

and patient!* he

says. "With the

information I yarned

I was able to

dramatically

streamline my

operations and

Improve the equality

of my product

as well."

streamline my operations and

improve the quality of my product

as well."

Strauss still occasionally seeks some

guidance and vice versa. "They often

call on me when they need a

materials expert," says Strauss.

Today, Strauss is looking for a larger

facility and is trying to market his gas

atomization technique to a new

industry—jewelry manufacturing.

"They are not comfortable, yet, using

a powder to make jewelry, but I'm

working on it," says Strauss. And, if

he does decide to jump into a larger

pond and needs some assistance, he

knows he can tum to the NIST New

York Manufacturing Extension

Partnership.

32
NIST

Industrial

Impact

Company:

Prime Tube Inc.

Livonia, Michigan

business:

Small automotive supplier

Number of Employees:

45

The National Institute of

Standards and Technology is an agency of the U.S. Department

of Commerce's Technology

Administration. NI6T promotes

U.S. economic growth by working

with industry to develop and

apply technology, measurements,

and standards.

February 1994

When the Chrysler Corp. recently

pared its list of suppliers of tubular

parts by more than 75 percent, one of

the five survivors was Prime Tube

Inc., a Livonia, Mich., manufacturer

with a payroll of 45 people. To Prime

Tube president Frank Firek, the

selection served as solid evidence that

several years of effort and more than

$100,000 invested in improving the

company's operations and its

products does, indeed, pay.

Many of the performance-enhancing

changes undertaken by Prime Tube

were originally spawned by a strategic

assessment carried out with the help

of a team of experts from the NIST

Midwest Manufacturing Technology

Center (MTC), based in nearby Ann

Arbor. "Some of the programs

resulting from that work with the

MTC are a strong part of the reason we were chosen" as a tier-one supplier

by Chrysler, Firek says.

Prime Tube is a repeat customer of

the MTC, starting out as a participant

in one of the center's continuous

improvement user groups and later

drawing on several technical services

provided by the organization. In the

user group—a self-help tool for

small manufacturers—managers

from Prime Tube and five other

automotive suppliers met six times a

year with a facilitator to address

specific operational issues, share ideas

and experiences, and track each

others' progress on specific

continuous improvement projects.

One benefit of the interactions,

according to Firek, was that it

enforced a discipline on each

company's efforts to improve.

Tapping the MTC's expertise, Prime

Tube decided to undergo a

comprehensive evaluation of its

entire business and its current

market. That assessment provided

Firek and his managers with a

thorough accounting of the

company's strengths and

weaknesses—in manufacturing,

marketing, and other areas of the

business—and it helped to better

That assessment

provided Firek

and his managers

with a thorough

accounting of

the company's

strengths and

weakneeees—in

manufacturing,

marketing, and

other areas of

the business.

define the market for Prime Tube

products. One aim of the evaluation,

explains Ray Vander Bok of the

Midwest MTC, is to help companies

identily what steps they must take to

"align themselves with their

customers"; another is to give them a

clear picture of how they stack up

against their competition.

But the "real trick," Vander Bok

explains, "is not the number of

recommended actions for

improvement, but identifying which

ones to do first—the activities that

will make the biggest difference.

Small manufacturers are limited in

33
resources and people. They have to

focus on the areas where they will get

the 'biggest bang for the buck.'

Firek says his company intends to implement all of the recommended

improvement actions, beginning with

the ones that promise the biggest

return on investment. Actions already

taken—some with the assistance of

Midwest MTC staff—include

implementing a preventive

maintenance program and an

automated inspection system,

reconfiguring the plant into work

cells, and determining literacy

requirements for all manufacturing

jobs.

These measures are paying off. For

example, scrap and rework has

decreased by at least 50 percent, and

the company has reduced its

inventory by about 30 percent. These

"If we had not

Implemented

the changes

recommended by

the MTC,"

FIrek says, "we

would have been

forced to shut

our doors."

and other improvements are making

Prime Tube more competitive,

permitting it to pass cost savings on to

customers.

Among automotive suppliers, Firek

says, reducing costs without

sacrificing quality has become an

imperative for survival. Intense

competition is squeezing profit

margins and forcing companies like

Prime Tube to sharpen their focus on

markets and customers.

Largely because of a major

customer's across-the-board moves to

cut input costs. Prime Tube's sales

dropped in the past year, Firek says. That decline might have been fatal if Prime Tube had not already been well

into its program of continuous

improvement.

"If we had not implemented the

changes recommended by the MTC,"

Firek says, "we would have been

forced to shut our doors." Instead, he

adds. Prime Tube is becoming a

better, more efficient company with a

tighter business focus and a

brightening financial picture.

34
NIST

I nduatrial

Impact

Company.

Spartanburg Steel Products Inc.

Spartanburg, South Carolina

business:

Manufacturer of stamped metal parts

Number of Employees:

600

Company:

Coastal Technologies Inc.

Vamville, South Carolina

business:

Manufacturer of mist eliminators

Number of Employees:

15

The National Institute of

Standards and Technology is an agency of the U.S. Department

of Commerce's Technology

Administration. NIST promotes

U.S. economic growth by working

with industry to develop and apply

technology, measurements,

and standards.

March 1994

Through the NIST Southeast

Manufacturing Technology Center

(MTC), manufacturers of products

ranging from fishing rods and

baseboard heaters to parts for cars and pressure vessels for geothermal

power plants are taking advantage of

computer-aided techniques that can

speed product design and

development.

One satisfied customer is the

engineering department at

Spartanburg Steel Products Inc., a

South Carolina supplier of stamped

automobile parts that employs about

600 people. With a technical assist

from the Southeast MTC's

Computer-Aided Design Laboratory,

Spartanburg Steel successfully

responded to a challenge by one of its major customers and thereby

strengthened their relationship.

Specifically, Spartanburg Steel

faced the task of developing a lighter,

lower-cost altemative to the metal

brace used to secure the dashboard

to the frame of an automobile made

by the customer. The company

developed a new design, but, then,

its engineers hit a snag: Because of

the part's complex geometry,

conventional, manual methods of

stress analysis were not a practical,

cost-effective option for determining

whether the design would satisfy

the load conditions and other

structural-integrity requirements

specified by the customer.

A possible solution emerged when

Spartanburg Steel engineers attended

a "CEO breakfast" on predictive

engineering technology, which was

arranged by the Greenville Technical

College, an affiliate of the

Columbia-based Southeast MTC.

Recognizing that the technology

might serve its needs, the company

requested an in-depth seminar on a

particular technique, known as finiteelement analysis.

Presented with the challenge facing

the company's engineers, senior

specialists from the Southeast

MTC proposed a computer-based

approach that could be used to

conduct the essential stress and

weight analyses. Using the center's

coordinate measuring machine, the

specialists measured 10,000 different

points on the surface of the part

supplied by Spartanburg Steel. The

digital data were used to create a

graphic model, permitting reliable

simulations of stress tests with the

With a technical

assist from the

Southeast MTC's

Computer-Aided

Oesign Laboratory,

the company

successfully

responded to a

challenge by one of

its major customers.

finite-element-analysis technique.

The analysis of the new design

revealed the distribution of stresses

over the surface of the part.

The findings confinned that a part

based on the new design, which

would reduce the weight of the brace

by nearly a pound, would satisfy the

customer's structural requirements.

35
Now in full production, the part is

being used daily in a popular,

high-volume vehicle.

Curtis Rhodes, one of the Southeast

MTC specialists who worked with

Spartanburg Steel, says that

finite-element analysis is a valuable

tool for evaluating designs. But, he

adds, most small and medium-sized

companies cannot justify investing in

the technology and in training a staff member to apply it.

"Companies will have only an

occasional need for finite-element

analysis," Rhodes explains. "When

you need the technology, it's more

efficient to go outside the company

and acquire this capability as a

service."

Most small and

medium-sized

companies cannot

justify investing

in the technology

and in training

a staff member

to apply it.

Rhodes and his colleagues have a

steady stream of customers who are

doing just that. For example. Coastal

Technologies, of Vamville, S.C.,

recently used the Southeast MTC's

service during the design phase of an ongoing project to build a 40-foot-tall

pressure vessel, or cyclone separator,

that will be packaged with one of

Coastal's mist eliminators, the

company's main product. When

completed, the equipment will be

supplied to a Japanese constmction

company building a geothermal

power plant in Asia. It will be used to remove potentially destructive

particles from underground steam

that will drive the plant's turbines.

Harry Wechsler, president of the

15-employee firm, explains that,

because of an unusual feature

specified by the customer and

unaddressed by engineering codes,

Coastal was required to do a thorough mechanical analysis of

the design. "We didn't have the

resources—hardware, software, or

expertise—but we knew the MTC

did," he says, noting that Coastal has

used the center's services on several

occasions. "Our relationship with the

MTC has been very beneficial. We

make use of them whenever we think

they can help us."

36
NIST

Induatrial

Impact

Company:

Thomson Berry Farms

Duluth, Minnesota

business:

Manufacturer of jams, syrups,

dressings, and vinegars

Number of Employees:

20

The National Institute of

Standards and Technolo^ is an agency of the U.S. Department

of Commerce's Technology

Administration. NIST promotes

U.S. economic growth by working

with industry to develop and apply

technology, measurements,

and standards.

February 1994

In less than 2 years, the business

outlook for Thomson Berry Farms, a

Duluth, Minn., manufacturer of jams,

syrups, dressings, and vinegars, has

changed from glum to glowing. A

50-percent increase in productivity

and an anticipated 100-percent

increase in sales can lead to that kind

of transformation.

And, in tum, a boom in business can

save jobs. To keep up with increasing

demand, Thomson's management

has retained all 20 positions in the

company.

Some of the credit for the change in

fortune goes to the NIST Upper

Midwest Manufacturing Technology

Center (MTC), which hnked

Thomson Berry Farms with the

manufacturing expertise it needed

and then served as technical adviser

as the company revamped its

processing operations.

Thomson's new management, which

took over the company in 1992,

recognized market opportunities for

the company's specialty products, but

it lacked experience in automated

manufacturing. "My background

is wholesale and retail food

distribution," explains Paul Leonidas,

Thomson's chairman and chief

executive officer. "The only thing I knew about jam was that you put it on your toast in the moming."

By hooking up with a regional

office of the Upper Midwest MTC,

Thomson's management remedied

this shortcoming. Using the services

of an engineering consultant secured

with the assistance of the MTC, the

small company began to automate

manual processes that drove up

production costs and, in effect, were

forcing Thomson to price its products

out of the market. The engineering

consultant designed a new plant

layout, helped the company draft

equipment specifications, and then

located sources of that equipment.

"Our changes

allowed us to

cut our labor

costs in half,"

without eliminating

any jobs,

explains Leonidas.

The answers to Thomson's

manufacturing needs already

existed—in the fonn of used

equipment. For an investment of

$32,000, the company secured

jar-cooling equipment, conveyers,

and a filling machine, all of which

were incorporated into the new plant

layout. The company estimates that,

within a year, waste reduction and

other cost savings will pay for the

entire investment.

"Our changes allowed us to cut our labor costs in half," without

eliminating any jobs, explains

Leonidas. "They also helped us go out

and seek more business. We have

almost quadrupled the production

capabilities of the plant"—to more

than 3-5 million units a year.

"Plant improvements, together with

tighter controls, have turned our company—in 1 year—into a

profitable enterprise," he says.

37
In the year since it was establislied

in August 1992, tiie Upper

Midwest MTC, wliich is based in

Minneapolis, provided services to

nearly 1,100 small and medium-sized

manufacturers. Though the center's

principal customers are firms in the

computer, machinery, metal

fabrication, and plastics and

composites industries, the MTC serves

a diverse clientele as the interaction

with Thomson Berry Farms attests. And like Thomson, the vast majority

(more than 80 percent) of

Minnesota's 8,700 manufacturers

employ fewer than 50 people.

"Small businesses like ours need the

kind of help you [MTCs] provide,"

says Leonidas, "because we don't

have the resources of the larger

companies."

99

"Small businesses

like ours need

the kind of help

you [MTCs] provide,'

says Leonidas,

"because we

don't have the

resources of the

larger companies."

33
Laboratory

Impacts

39

NIST

Industrial

Impact

Industry:

Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration

Institute

Arlington, Virginia

3usiness:

Designing, manufacturing, installing,

and maintaining residential and

industrial cooling and refrigeration

equipment

Size:

$20 billion in shipments

The National Institute of

Standards and Technology is an agency of the U.S. Department

of Commerce's Technology

Administration. NIST promotes

U.S. economic growth by working

with industry to develop and apply

technology, measurements,

and standards.

July 1994

In 1937, before a rapt crowd at a

meeting of the American Chemical

Society, Thomas Midgely, Jr., filled

his lungs with vapors of

dichlorofluoromethane, the world's

first chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) -based

refrigerant, and then extinguished a

candle as he exhaled. He convinced

the audience that this chemical,

which he had come up with 7 years

earlier at the Dayton Engineering

Laboratories Co. (Delco), was neither

flammable nor toxic. Had he tried the

stunt with the standard refrigerants of

the day—ammonia, methyl chloride,

and sulfur dioxide—the outcome

ultimiately would have included some

mix of choking, fire, bums, cancer,

and death.

CFCs, which became well known

under the DuPont trade name Freon,

quickly grew into a massive

commodity chemical used not only

for refrigeration but also for

industrial solvents and foaming

agents for insulation, cushions, and

packing material. When he died in

1944, Midgely had no idea that CFCs

already had begun wending their way

into the upper atmosphere where they

were initiating the destruction of

stratospheric ozone molecules, which

shield life from dangerous ultraviolet

portions of solar radiation. Nor did he

know that four decades later the

industrial world would agree to cease

producing CFCs altogether by 1996 in an effort to stave off the ozone kill.

That dramatic multinational

agreement has forced a number of

CFC-dependent industries to enter an

innovate-for-your-life phase in which

they need to come up with CFC

substitutes if they expect to remain in

business in the next millennium. One

of those industries is represented by

the Air-Conditioning and

Refrigeration Institute (ARI). "We

had been using CFCs forever, and now

we have to get rid of them on short

order," says Mark Menzer, vice

president of research and technology

for ARI, noting that researchers at the

National Institute of Standards and

Technology (NIST) are playing a

critical supportive role in this

transition.

Researchers at

NI6T are playing

a critical

supportive role

in this transition.

The challenge resides in the chemical

virtuosity of CFCs, save for that fatal

flaw of destroying stratospheric ozone

molecules. Before that revelation,

CFCs were wonder chemicals—safe,

non-toxic, stable, easy to handle,

inexpensive, and useful in many

ways, including refrigeration. The

refrigeration value resides in their

ability to undergo countless cycles of

volumetric expansion into a gaseous

state—during which the CFC gas

draws heat from its surroundings

such as a refrigerator's interior—and

condensation, during which a

compressor forces the refrigerant back

into the liquid state ready for the next

cycle.

Any CFC replacement must come

close to matching CFCs virtues while

lacking its vices. "We have not found

any drop-in replacements" that can

simply take the place of CFCs like one

cola for another, Menzer says. HCFCs,

41
in which hydrogen atoms replace one

or more of the chlorine atoms in

CFCs, are excellent refrigerants but

are not a long-term solution since

they too can destroy ozone molecules;

by 2010 at the latest, HCFCs also will

be off limits in new equipment.

That has pushed air conditioning and

refrigeration companies to look

toward more complicated refrigerants,

including blends of two or more

components, an exercise that entails

redesigning new cooling and

refrigeration systems and testing

blends for a long list of physical

properties. "We knew we would need

data, high-quality data, since small

design errors based on the data can

lead to big miscalculations" about a

cooling unit's efficiency and cost,

Menzer explains. Multiply each

cooling unit by the many thousands

that would be sold and the

importance of good engineering data

magnifies. That is where data

generated and compiled by NIST

researchers into a user-friendly

personal computer program, called

REFPROP, have been coming into the

picture of ARI's members. "We have

used NIST data and the REFPROP

program as the standard," Menzer

says.

"Without NIST,

we would have

gotten less detailed

data, which would

have meant a lot

more expensive,

time-consuming

engineering work to

produce hardware. It

would have cost us

millions more."

Soon after the 1987 signing of the

Montreal Protocol, which provides for

the phaseout of CFCs by 1996,

researchers at NIST began a major

effort to measure thermophysical

properties of individual

environmentally acceptable

refrigerants and mixtures involving

up to five components. Accurate

information about these properties is

critical for engineers who aim to

design the most energy-efficient air

conditioning and refrigeration

systems.

"We have used this information for

making important decisions," Menzer

says. It has helped companies quickly

zero in on blends worth testing in

their engineering labs. "Without

NIST, we would have gotten less

detailed data, which would have

meant a lot more expensive,

time-consuming engineering work to produce hardware. It would have cost

us millions more." Moreover, he adds,

without NIST and REFPROP serving

as a common source of data for the

industry, each company probably

would eventually make different

choices about refrigerants, a scenario

that would lead to a technical Tower

of Babel for the maintenance and

repair community. NIST has sold over

500 copies of REFPROP, whose latest

version includes data for 38

refrigerants and many of their

mixtures.

In a letter to R.F. Kayser, chief of the

NIST Thermophysics Division,

Donald Bivens, an engineering

fellow in DuPont's Fluorochemicals

Laboratory, echoed Menzer's

assessment of NIST's contribution.

"All of this work by NIST has

permitted the U.S. refrigeration and

air conditioning industry to

accurately design equipment for the

altemative fluorocarbons, resulting in

efficient operations."

42
NIST

Indu6trial

Impact

Companies:

Amersham/MediPhysics, Illinois

Bristol-Myers Squibb, NewJersey

Du Pont Merck Pharmaceutical,

Massachusetts

Mallinckrodt Medical, Missouri

Nordion International,

Ontario, Canada

Packard Instruments, Illinois

Syncor International, California

The National Institute of

Standards and 'Xec\\Y\o\oq^ is an agency of the U.S. Department

of Commerce's lec\\Y\o\oqi^

Administration. NIST promotee

U.S. economic growth by working

with industry to develop and apply

technology, measurements,

and standards.

April 1994

Inventing ways to see inside bodies

without cutting into them is one of

the medical community's shining

successes. Radioactive isotopes that

can be injected safely into patients'

bloodstreams and tissues get a lot of

credit for that success. These so-called

radiopharmaceuticals work like

transient spies sending diagnostic

signals from inside the body to

external detectors and computers,

which constmct images of internal

body structures from those signals.

Like good spies too, the isotopes

quickly disappear once their job is

done, either by transforming into

non-radioactive products or by

passing out of the body.

If they know precisely how much

radioactivity each dose harbors,

doctors can confidently inject patients

with radioactive drugs such as

thallium-201 for heart scans.

Determining the exact amount of

radioactivity is an especially

demanding measurement task,

however, since radioactive isotopes

are produced at private or govemment facilities, made into

radiopharmaceutical preparations by

a number of different companies, and

then put to diagnostic use at

thousands of hospitals. All the while,

the radioactivity contents to be

measured are changing. Unlike the

weight of a pill, which remains

constant from maker to patient, the

activity of radiopharmaceuticals

continually decreases over time.

Regardless of the challenges, each

radiopharmaceutical handler must

have a way of assuring that their own

radioactivity measurements are

accurate. Nuclear Regulatory

Commission rules, for one, require

such measurements. Good business

and good medicine also critically

depend on the quality of these

measurements.

Assurance of that quality stems from

the National Institute of Standards

and Technology, remarks

Tibor Schubert, manager of

radiodiagnostics at Bristol-Myers

Squibb. For the past 20 years, NIST

and the Nuclear Energy Institute

(formerly the United States Council

for Energy Awareness) , which

represents the nuclear power and

nuclear medicine industries, have

collaborated to provide the industn/

with standards that everyone can use

as benchmarks. "It helps make sure

that everyone is on the same

wavelength," says Schubert, who

"It increases the

confidence for

everybody" who

makes and uses

radiopharmaceuticals.

chairs a NIST/NEI steering group that

sets the agenda for the collaboration.

"It increases the confidence for

everybody" who makes and uses

radiopharmaceuticals, adds Michael

S. Mosley, a quality control and

govemment affairs specialist at

Syncor Intemational Corp., the

country's fastest growing "nuclear

pharmacy."

That confidence level has contributed

to the ascent of radiopharmaceuticals

both as a standard part of medical

practice and as big business,

say Schubert, Mosley, and others

43
in the industry. Each year, U.S.

doctors perform over 7 miUion

diagnostic procedures using

radiopharmaceuticals. About one

out of every four patients entering

hospitals undergoes some form of

radioactive diagnostic or therapeutic

procedure. Many cardiac patients

undergo the thallium-201 stress test, which allows doctors to image the

damaged heart for guidance in

treating heart patients. The market

for radiopharmaceutical preparations

now approaches $1 billion.

When the NIST/NEI collaboration

began in 1973, there were no

standards for three out of four

radiopharmaceuticals then available,

nor were there uniformly adopted

protocols by which instruments in

different places were calibrated even when standards were available. These

and other measurement problems

slowed Food and Drug Administration

approval of new drugs and led to

disputes between vendors and buyers

"F^rticipation in

the program

and having

radiopharmaceuticals

[whose activities

are] traceable to

NI6T standards

gives member

companies a

competitive

advantage."

of radiopharmaceuticals since prices

are determined not by weight but by

the amount of radioactivity sold.

Out of the collaboration so far have

come more than two dozen new

Standard Reference Materials (SRMs),

which are distributed as small sealed

ampoules containing specific

radiopharmaceuticals with

NIST-certified amounts of

radioactivity. Vendors and buyers use

these to calibrate their own

measurements. Among these SRMs,

which are prepared and certified by

three scientists at NISTwho are

supported by a fee paid by member

companies, are standards for

thallium-201; iodine- 131, an agent

for diagnosing and treating thyroid

problems; and technetium-99ni,

which is used in procedures such as imaging brain tissue.

Besides the collaboration's intangible

payoff in the form of product and

industry confidence, the NlST-made

SRMs have a more direct impact on

companies' bottom lines. "If a company went out and developed

these on its own, you are talking

maybe $1 million," estimates Felix

Killar, manager of Non-Utility

Programs for NEI. "Participation in

the program and having

radiopharmaceuticals Iwhose

activities are] traceable to NIST

standards gives member companies a

competitive advantage."

44
NIST

Induetrial

Impact

Company.

Analogy Inc.

Beaverton, Oregon

Business:

Makers of simulation software tools

for designers of electronic circuitry

Number of Emplpyees:

120 worldwide

The National Institute of

Standards and Technolo^ is an agency of the U.S. Department

of Commerce's Technology

Administration. NIST promotes

U.S. economic growth by working

with industry to develop and apply

technology, measurements,

and standards.

May 1994

Using tools to make better tools

has been standard practice since

Paleolithic times. Now, engineers

even use the silicon-based brains of

computers as simulation tools for

designing next-generation silicon

chips, a practice that streamlines the

costly trial-and-error cycle of making,

testing, and redesigning actual

prototypes. Problem: Simulation has

yet to play a major role in the

growing niche of "power electronics,"

which control voltages and currents

in millions of appliance motors,

automotive ignition systems, and

electric vehicles that are often

millions of times higher than the

voltages and currents in integrated

circuits.

That design limitation is in the midst

of becoming history. A chain of events

that began with a chance 1989

meeting between Allen Hefner, an

electrical engineer at the National

Institute of Standards and

Technology, and Daniel Diebolt of

Analogy Inc., an Oregon software

company, led to new simulation tools

that already are changing the way

Motorola makes some of its electrical

products and the way Ford Motor Co.

makes cars. These tools are helping to

bring power electronics technologies

to larger U.S. markets and are putting

the United States in a better

competitive position in the global

power electronics market, says Dan

Artusi, director of operations for power

transistors at Motorola's Power

Products Division in Phoenix, Ariz.

One of the obstacles has been that

power electronics are more difficult

to simulate than standard

microelectronics because the physics

describing their operation is more

complicated. That is partly because

they generate much more heat, which

in tum affects the electrical behavior

of their components, notes Peter

Decher, Analogy's director of

modeling. Without reliable

simulation tools, makers and users

of power electronics have had no

recourse but to make actual devices,

test them, and then redesign them

based on the test results—an

expensive and uncertain process that

These tools are

helping to bring

power electronics

technologies to

larger U.S. markets

and are putting the

United States in a

better competitive

position...

.

has limited the power electronics

market. It also has meant that the

power electronics now in use are not

controlling the motors, engines, and

other downstream components as

well as they could.

The 5-year-old NIST/Analogy

collaboration seems to be smoothing

the way for power electronics. It began at a technical conference of

electrical engineers where Diebolt

heard Hefner give a talk on power

electronics focusing on an important,

relatively new component called an

Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor

(IGBT). It struck a chord. Earlier,

engineers working on ignition

systems at Ford Motor Co. had told

engineers at Motorola that new

45
generations of semiconductor power

electronics would be more than

welcome since they could lead to cars

that burned fuel more efficiently.

That message naturally ended up

reaching Analogy, since its Saber

simulator, a software tool which is

used mostly by large corporate chip

designers, often was central to the

design of Motorola's electronic

systems.

Within months. Analogy and NIST

drew up a Cooperative Research and

Development Agreement. By the end

of 1989, their collaboration had

yielded a preliminary computer

model that would clearly work as part

of an upgraded Saber simulator. By

mid-1991, the model had proven itself

in principle for a variety of circuit

design applications. Before the year was up, Alan Mantooth, a senior

engineer at Analogy, had further

developed the model to the point that

the company could include it in its commercial simulation packages. In

Hefner's words, "He bullet-proofed it

in the Saber context," and it has

become a standard part of the

commercial program. Adds Decher:

"We view this as a strategic

collaboration, and we want to

continue down this path."

The initial commercial payoff of the

work was an upgrade in 1992 of

Saber, Analogy's bread-and-butter

simulation package. Now, in addition

the end of 1939,

the NIST/Analo^y

collaboration had

yielded a preliminary

computer model

that would clearly

work as part of

an upgraded

Saber simulator.

to simulating standard integrated

circuits with low-voltage, low-current

components. Saber incorporates an IGBT model. At the same time in

1992, Motorola, whose engineers used

the Saber IGBT model, announced a new generation of automotive

ignition coils that rely on an IGBT to

control the electrical pulses going to a

car's spark plugs. One good thing

leads to another. In February 1994,

Ford Motor Co. announced plans to

use Motorola's IGBTs in ignition

systems during the 1995 model year.

As Artusi sees it, that is just the

beginning for Motorola. "We intend

to establish a strong capability in

power semiconductors in the United

States," he says, adding that such

technologies will be a key to higher

efficiency machinery, appliances,

lamps, and vehicles. That would

cascade into the additional benefits

of reduced energy needs and less

pollution production. He credits

Hefner's IGBT model as a springboard

for such visions.

There's more than handwaving for

arguing that such visions could

become reality. In August 1993,

Motorola's Semiconductor Products

Sector and Analogy signed a

$3 million, 3-year pact whose goal is something that Artusi calls "virtual

prototyping." More specifically, the

two companies aim to produce

simulations of IGBT-based devices,

which it will send to clients such as

car companies who plug the models

into their own simulated products to

get an idea of how an actual power

electronic component will behave.

"This will allow customers to do a

first-pass design very quickly,

determine if the characteristics of the

initial tmodeled] device are correct,

and give us high-quality feedback,"

Artusi told the trade publication

Electronic Engineering Times.

Hefner is pleased by the steam that

industry is getting out of his work.

He also supplies free versions of the

model that academic researchers can

plug into SPICE (Simulation

Program with Integrated Circuit

Emphasis)—software developed in

the early 1970s at the University of

Califomia at Berkeley—that has

become a standard for simulating

integrated circuits. As Hefner sees it,

the more you increase the number of

people thinking about power

electronics the more innovation is bound to happen.

46
NIST

Indudtrial

Impact

Company:

The Automotive Composites

Consortium:

Ford Motor Company

Dearbom, Michigan

General Motors Corporation

Detroit, Michigan

Chrysler Corporation

Highland Park, Michigan

business:

Automotive manufacturers

Number of Employees:

Approximately 1,240,000

The National Institute of

Standands and Technology is an agency of the U.S. Department

of Commerce's Technology

Administration. NIST promotes

U.S. economic growth by working

with industry to develop and apply

technology, measurements,

and standards.

March 1994

Pressure to substitute traditional

materials with others that are

cheaper, stronger, lighter, or better by

some measure than the originals is a

fundamental driver of technological

change and adaptation. The risks and

rewards are largest for industries like

the car industry, which rely on vast amounts of materials.

The availability of inexpensive steel

early in this century made mass

production of cars more

technologically and economically

sensible. "It replaced wood in auto

bodies and enabled [the car industry]

to make larger, more reliable, higher

performance products," says Carl

Johnson, a product engineer at Ford's

Scientific Research Laboratory

in Dearbom, Mich. In 1991, the

automotive industry used 10 million

tons of steel.

The material virtues of strength,

durability, and manufacturability

that have made steel so critical to car makers may no longer be enough to

offset a drawback—its

heaviness—that has become a

critical liability in today's ever more

environmentally minded context.

Every extra pound in a car translates

into higher fuel consumption and

pollution output. The search is on for

lightweight, environmentally sound

substitutes that can be integrated into

the manufacturing process and

provide the necessary strength, crash

worthiness, and durability.

Composites, which are combinations

of two different materials that each

contribute desirable traits normally

not found combined in any one

material, are a leading candidate for

substitution. That is why the big three

automakers—Ford, General Motors,

and Chrysler—joined forces in 1988

to form the Automotive Composites

Consortium (ACC) and sought the

assistance of the National Institute of

Standards and Technology with their

efforts.

Composites have a long history.

One of the earliest examples still in

use—straw mixed into a mud

base—^yields a building material that

That is why

the b\Q three

automakers

Ford, General

Motors, and

Chrysler—joined

forces in \9&&

to form the

Automotive

Composites

Consortium and

sought the

assistance of the

National Institute

of Standards and

Technology with

their efforts,

is stronger and more crack resistant

than mud alone. The higher tech

automotive composites now being

developed through the ACC are made

from polymers such as urethanes (the

mud) and glass fibers (the straw),

which are either pressed into random

mats like the filters of home heating

fumaces or woven or braided into

fabric-like mats. Experimental

47
composite parts weigh up to 40 percent less than their steel

counterparts and could shave

hundreds of pounds from each car.

The challenge for the ACC (in 1992

the ACC became part of US CAR,

a broader based private-sector/

govemment program with the

goal of producing high-quality,

high-efficienq cars) is to develop a

practical, affordable composite

technology that can meet some of the

most demanding manufacturing

specifications on the planet. For

example, "the front rail of the car

holds the engine up, takes all road

loads, and must handle the crash

energy" to meet specifications, points

out Elio Eusebi, head of the polymers

department at General Motors

Research and Development Center in

Warren, Mich.

The composite-forming method most

likely to end up on production lines

probably will go something like this: A fiber mat is placed into a two-part,

heatable mold, which is then shut,

imposing the shape of the car component onto the dry mat. Liquid

resin, polymerization agents, and

other ingredients then are injected or drawn into the closed mold where

they permeate the mat like water

through a dry sponge. The high

temperature in the mold initiates a

chemical curing process resulting in

a fiber-reinforced polymeric part in

the desired shape. All this has to take

place reliably and nearly flawlessly in

a matter of seconds. "I don't want to

build a mold and discover that I can't

get resin into the comer," Eusebi says.

"NI6T has saved

us the entire

expense and time

rec^uired to make

accurate models,

which is several

man-years of work.'*

He, Johnson, and others working in

the consortium say that the way to preempt the time and expense of that

kind of unwelcome surprise is to

create computer models that

engineers can use to predict how

variations in a part's shape and size

will affect the composite-making

process. The models ought to give

engineers the power to quickly modify

the process for each part, rather

than having to go through a trialand-error process each and every time

to determine processing details such

as how fast the liquid resin ought to

be injected or what kind of fiber mat

to use.

That's where researchers at NIST are making unique contributions to the

composite R&D project, say industry

consortium participants. Frederick

Phelan, who was hired at NIST soon

after the ACC began, has been

developing computer models that

predict critical process conditions

such as how quickly liquid resin will

flow into fiber mats in various shapes

and the pressure generated during

injection. To ensure that the models

are realistic, Phelan's colleague,

Richard Pamas, has developed

protocols and materials, such as

standardized fiber mats, that he and

ACC members can use to measure the

permeability into fiber mats under

different conditions. "Without

experimental permeability data,

everything is hypothetical," Johnson

says.

Though industry insiders are

optimistic about composites, no one

yet can say just how extensively the

materials might substitute for steel.

At the moment, the composites

remain too expensive to design and

manufacture. Also, their properties

are still not understood with enough

confidence, and recycling issues need

to be resolved. NIST is helping with

these problems, say industry

researchers, by leveraging company

research to demystify the material.

"It is extending what we can do,"

says Douglas Denton at Chrysler's

Materials Engineering facility in

Aubum Hill, Mich. Adds GM's Eusebi:

"NIST has saved us the entire expense

and time required to make accurate

models, which is several man-years of

work." With input from all of this

effort, it is likely that historical

industrial decisions about millions of

tons of steel and resin and about

automotive design will be made.

Postscript: Aerospace companies,

including Grumman and Boeing,

which also see a future for strong,

lightweight composites as substitute

materials for heavier metallic alloys,

have initiated collaborations with the

same composites experts at NIST. The

same kind of process understanding

and predictive abilities that the ACC

needs to make composites work in the

automotive context is an absolute

requirement in the aeronautics

context, notes Lyle Schwartz, director

of NIST's Materials Science and

Engineering Laboratory.

46
NIST

Induatrial

Impact

Company:

CEM Corporation

Matthews, North Carolina

business:

Manufacturer of microwave-based

analytical instrumentation

Number of Employees:

130

The National Institute of

5tandansis and Technolo^ is an agency of the U.S. Department

of Commerce's Technology

Administration. NIST promotes

U.S. economic growth by working

with industry to develop and apply

technologic, measurements,

and standards.

February 1994

By the late 1970s, the CEM Corp. had

begun earning a name for itself in

the new arena of microwave-assisted

chemical analysis. At the time, the

standard way to analyze rugged,

hard-to-dissolve metallic, soil, and

other inorganic samples was to dump

the samples into a strong mineral

acid and heat it up on a hot plate.

Then researchers would wait, and

wait, and maybe wait some more,

until the hot acid digested the sample

enough for analysis by spectroscopy

and other standard methods. Many

jobs also required some kind of

specific fiddling—maybe a stint on a

shaker table or a more rigorous

heating regimen. As a result, analysts

had to know and use a variety of

protocols that could take anywhere

from hours to several days.

Word about CEM's apparently simpler

microwave altemative spread quickly

to companies in the oil, chemical,

mining, and environmental

monitoring industries where analysis

of metal-containing soil and sludge,

ceramic powders, and minerals was a

daily need. With the microwave

technique, the sample and acid go

into a closed Teflon container, which

is then heated in the microwave for a

few minutes, 30 at the most. The

sample comes out ready for analysis.

"When people became aware of our microwave work, they came to us

asking about it," recalls CEM CEO

Michael Collins.

That was just fine, but Collins knew

CEM (which stands for Chemistry,

Electronics, and Mechanics—the

disciplines that CEM's three founders

brought into the company) could not

yet offer customers a ready-to-go

system. The specific microwave power,

time, and other factors required for

each type of sample could only be

determined by a time-consuming,

trial-and-error process. There was no

recourse for a new user but to go

through that process. Moreover, since

no one knew exactly how microwave

energy was digesting the samples, no

one could say just how the method

worked.

"When people

became aware of our

microwave work,

they came to us

asking about it,"

recalls CEM CEO

Michael Collins.

Despite drawbacks of the traditional

open-beaker, hot-plate methods,

analysts understood them, knew they

worked, and knew how to do them. It would be hard for CEM to break

through into bigger markets unless

the company could tell its customers

both how the microwave methods

worked and precisely which protocol

worked for a given type of sample.

"We didn't just want to ship our

customers a box and then leave them

on their own to make it work,"

Collins says.

With that goal on their minds,

Collins received a fateful call in 1983

from NIST chemist Skip Kingston,

now at Duquesne University. Kingston

was doing some research on

microwave-assisted chemistry and

became convinced that the

techniques had good potential to

simplify many chemical procedures.

49
He wanted to learn more about the

physical mechanisms underlying the

process and to develop the kind of

theoretical understanding that could

add microwave chemistry to the

generally accepted corpus of chemical

knowledge and techniques.

Kingston knew that CEM had been

selling microwave instrumentation

for a few years so he gave them a

call. Collins was interested. Within

a month, he had spent a day in

Kingston's Gaithersburg, Md.,

laboratory to discuss the possibilities

in more depth. A collaboration

seemed right for both parties. "Within

a few months, we had set up and

funded Lois Jassie as a research

associate at NIST," Collins recalls. As

part of this, Jassie enrolled in the

Ph.D. program at the nearby

American University, and this

microwave work became the basis for

her research and thesis. So, as CEM

was finalizing the design of what

would become production models of a microwave digester, the collaboration was developing application protocols

CEM found the

NIST comectlon eo

valuable that the

company kept

Jassie on at

NIST as a research

associate until

1993, nearly a

full decade,

for specific sample types as well as fundamental studies into the physics

and chemistry of the process. In short

order, these studies suggested to CEM

that a scalable Teflon container

would allow microwave energy to

penetrate to the contained sample

while enabling pressure to build up

inside without exploding.

By the end of 1984, CEM was selling a

closed-vessel microwave system. Sales

went up considerably following a

seminal paper by Kingston and Jassie

in the Oct. 12, 1986, issue of

Analytical Chemistry. "That paper

educated the technical community in

microwave-assisted chemistry,"

Collins says. By 1990, the microwave

digestion system had grown into

CEM's major product, with sales to

both domestic and foreign customers.

The company now is the industry

leader. "This year we expect to have

$30 million in sales and 40 percent

will come from our microwave

digestion products," Collins says.

CEM found the NIST connection so

valuable that the company kept Jassie

on at NIST as a research associate

until 1993, nearly a full decade. That

human connection enabled CEM to

benefit from NIST's strength in

protocol development, and NIST

researchers were able to keep abreast

of what users and makers of

microwave-based instruments were

doing and what they needed.

The future still holds plenty of

promise for the microwave-assisted

chemistry that CEM and NIST helped

shepherd into respectability and into

instrumentation that analysts can

buy. Says Collins: "We see this as an

emerging field, which is still in its

infancy."

50
NIST

Industrial

Impact

Company,

Coming Inc. Coming, New York

business:

Makers of consumer housewares and

specialty materials including optical

fibers

Company.

AT&T Bell Laboratories

Atlanta Works

Norcross, Georgia

business:

Providers of communications services

and products, computer systems, and

network equipment including optical

fibers

The National Institute of

Standards and Technology is an agency of the U.S. Department

of Commerce's Technology

Administration. NIST promotes

U.S. economic growth by working

with industry to develop and apply

technology, measurements,

and standarde.

March 1994

As you read this, the world is becoming ever more wired with

optical fibers. Growing networks of

millions of kilometers of glass fibers

cross continents and oceans linking

millions of people and computers

worldwide with pulses of informationladen light. Without optical fibers,

any talk of a National Information

Infrastructure would be little more

than a pipe dream.

With all of this growth, the need for

optical fiber makers and users to

standardize products, manufacturing

processes, and installation procedures

becomes critical. Lacking that,

technical incompatibilities that would

stunt growth of these networks, hinder

their maintenance and repair, and

thereby erode the international

competitiveness of the U.S. telecommunications industry could

emerge. This challenge is a classic

call to arms for researchers at the

National Institute of Standards and

Technology.

Since 1981, NIST has been working

closely with the Telecommunications

Industry Association to advance both

standards and technology for the

optical fiber industry. A 1992 report

prepared for NIST by an independent

economist estimated that NIST's aid

in the development of standards and

measurement protocols had by then

been responsible for annual savings

of $9-5 million in the optical fiber

industry, which was more than four

times the cumulative cost of the

collaborative work throughout the

entire 1980s.

A recent NIST contribution that has

been getting particularly high praise

from the industry goes by the

unassuming name of SRM 2520.

SRM stands for Standard Reference

Material, and SRM 2520 is one of

about a thousand different SRMs

that NIST prepares for hundreds of

industries that need reliable

benchmarks by which they can

calibrate their own tools, instmments,

chemical analyses, and other

measurement protocols.

At the heart of each SRM 2520, which

companies can purchase from NIST

for about $1,000, is an optical fiber

whose diameter has been more

accurately measured and certified

than any other fiber in the world. To

certify each standard, NIST metrology

expert Ted Doiron designed and built an exquisitely sensitive and accurate

micrometer that could measure fiber

NIST's aid in the

development of

standards and

measurement

protocols had by

then been

responsible for

annual savings

of $9.5 million in

the optical

fiber industry.

diameters with an uncertainty of

about 50 nanometers or the width of

about 100 molecular layers of the

glass. In the hands of the engineers at an optical fiber plant, an SRM 2520

serves as the most reliably calibrated

mler by which they can monitor the

uniformity of their own commercial

51
fibers, explains Matt Young, who

developed SRM 2520 with Steve

Mechels, Paul Hale, and other NIST

researchers.

SRM 2520 has become a necessary

tool in the production of optical fibers

even though the standard only

became available in 1993, according

to Jan H. Suwinski, an executive vice

president of Coming Inc. At the center

of the standard fiber is a glass core

about 10 micrometers in diameter

surrounded by a thicker glass

cladding whose outer diameter is

about 125 micrometers, or about two

hair-widths. (The cladding is coated

with a tough polymer to protect the

glass from environmental

degradation and breakage.)

The particular value of SRM 2520 is emerging as optical fibers reach from

major optical cables to individual

buildings, homes, and offices. This

phase of network growth entails

massive amounts of splicing and

matching of fibers, which can be

more expensive than stringing fibers

longer distances, a procedure

requiring fewer splices. Industry

experts say that variation in fiber

"The opportunity to

work with NIST on

this project qawe

Corning and other

American fiber

manufacturers a

clear competitive

advantage."

diameters would be calamitous

because, if the diameters differ, the

inner cores probably would fail to

align precisely when joined, resulting

in degraded light signals. And that

spells "disaster" for an industry whose

raison d'etre is transmitting signals

reliably and clearly. By using SRM

2520 to calibrate the fiber-making

process, the optical fiber industry can

increase the likelihood that its fibers

will align. According to Department of

Commerce statistics, the U.S. optical

fiber market amounted to $2.1 billion

in 1992, which was 40 percent of the

world total. That translates into a lot

of splicing.

"Another industry-wide study found

that the main problem in controlling

the cladding diameter was having a

reference," notes William Gardner,

who specializes in fiber measurement

standards at AT&T's optical fiber

plant in Norcross, Ga. With SRM

2520, he says, uncertainty in the

measurements of fiber diameters now

vary within about one-tenth of a micrometer (about the width of a cell

nucleus), which is about one-tenth of

the uncertainty that was typical before

SRM 2520 became available. Both

AT&T and Coming now use SRM

2520 routinely for quality control.

In a letter to Judson French, director

of NIST's Electronics and Electrical

Engineering Laboratory, Coming's

Suwinski wrote that "the opportunity

to work with NIST on this project gave

Coming and other American fiber

manufacturers a clear competitive

advantage."

For NIST, that kind of industry

feedback translates into a mission

accomplished. But not completed,

notes Young. NIST and the optical

fiber industry now are planning to work on other standards, including one for measuring the tiny diameters

of ceramic fermles that are used to

connect fibers into continuous

pathways of light.

52
NIST

Induetrial

Impact

Company,

Crucible Compaction Metals

Oakdale, Pennsylvania

business:

Producer of high-performance

materials and parts for aerospace and

other applications

Number of Employees:

65

The National Institute of

Standards and Technology is an agency of the U.S. Department

of Commerce's Technology

Administration. NIST promotes

U.S. economic growth by working

with industry to develop and apply

technology, measurements,

and standards.

February 1994

The inside of a working jet engine is a

hellish place. Hour after hour, day

after day, hot, corrosive combustion

gases flow over its intemal parts at

hundreds of miles per hour. Many of

these parts also rotate hundreds or

thousands of times per minute,

creating intemal strains that would

shred most materials in short order.

Yet those parts have to withstand the

punishment. There are no shoulders

for repairs in the jet stream.

William Eisen thinks about these facts

with more gravity than most people.

He is president of Crucible

Compaction Metals (CCM), an

Oakdale, Pa., company, one of the few

manufacturers of metal disks that

rotate at high speed at elevated

temperature to move gas through the

jet engines on military and civilian

aircraft. Given their hostile venues,

these disks and other parts that

Crucible makes have to be made of

the toughest, strongest, most reliable,

and most temperature-tolerant

material that his company can make

at a price that jet engine makers are

willing to pay. Moreover, with global

competition in both the aerospace

and advanced metals business on a

rapid ascent, Eisen can never afford to

coast on the quality and efficiency of

today's manufacturing processes.

Crucible's process starts with molten

metal of the proper chemistry that

will produce an alloy with the desired

materials properties. But, instead of

casting these parts by pouring molten

metal into molds, or first forming

billets that are shaped and processed

later, CCM converts the liquid metal

into fine powder using the so-called

inert gas atomization process. This

powder is then loaded into metal

containers (molds) and consolidated

into solid parts by hot isostatic

pressing. Very little machining and

finishing work is required afterward.

"You can make materials this way

that you can't forge or roll or make in

any other way," notes long-time NIST

metallurgist John Manning, director

of NIST's in-house powder metallurgy

research group, which operates a

The disks and

other parts that

Crucible makes have

to be made of

the toughest,

strongest, most

reliable, and most

tem peratu re-tolera nt

material.

powder making facility rigged with

sophisticated sensors and valves that can monitor and control exactly what

occurs as metal powders are made. It was a setup that no company had in

place or could afford.

For Crucible, the complex process

yields engine parts that fit the bill,

Eisen says, but its efficiency was

disappointing. NIST was soon to become part of the solution. The

problem had to do with the particles

in the metal powder. To create

parts with the range of properties

needed for jet engines, the particles

have to start out very small

with a maximum size about

0.076 millimeter (0.003 inch) in

diameter—and extremely uniform.

The small sizes of the particles help

53
produce uniform properties in the

finislied parts and also reduce the

sizes of voids or other imperfections,

which are the seeds of material

failure. If the company could reduce

the amount of oversize povi^der

produced, the process would become

more efficient, operating expenses

would decrease, and the company

would become more competitive.

With that chain of events never far

from Eisen's mind, he was especially

receptive in 1982 when he heard

about, and subsequently attended, a powder metallurgy conference in

Gaithersburg, Md., at the National

Institute of Standards and Technology

(then called the National Bureau of

Standards). "I had no idea of the

extent of work going on there," Eisen

recalls, adding that he hadn't

previously thought of NIST as a place

for getting answers to industrial

process problems.

After the meeting, he remained in

touch intermittently with the

metallurgy group. In 1986, Crucible was invited to join a research

consortium with NIST and other

powder metallurgy companies. The

consortium's goal would be to

develop more detailed knowledge

about how metal powders form and to

use this knowledge for making the

process more of a science. In 1987,

Crucible, General Electric Corp., and

The computer

model guided the

company in the

redesign of its gas

delivery system,

thereby increasing

"the percentage of

usable powder

produced during

the atomization

process by over

40 percent."

Hoeganaes Corp. joined NIST to form

the consortium. It was renewed in

1991 with two of the old partners

and four new players and will end

after 6 years in 1994.

The half-decade involvement paid off

for Crucible in higher efficiency and

lower costs. One crucial part of this

gain was a computer model developed

by the NIST fluid flow group. It

enabled Crucible engineers to

simulate accurately what was

happening as particles foraied rather

than having to guess what happened

by examining finished particles. The

model had a lot to consider. The

powders are made in an atomization

process by letting the molten metal

fall through a nozzle at the end of

which a high-velocity stream of inert

gas blows the liquid metal stream into

a fine mist of tiny spherical droplets.

These cool and solidify almost

instantaneously and are collected

downstream.

"We suspected that if we could

understand the gas dynamics, we

could control our process more

successfully," Eisen says. They were

right. The model, which the fluid flow

group was able to develop using data

obtained from NIST's supersonic inert

gas metal atomizer, was designed to

help CCM and other consortium

members optimize their processes

without having to tell each

competitive details. "We now use this

model the way other manufacturers

rely on computer-aided design,"

Eisen says.

In a 1992 letter to Lyle Schwartz,

director of NIST's Materials Science

and Engineering Laboratory, Eisen

noted that the computer model

guided his company in the redesign of

its gas delivery system, thereby

increasing "the percentage of usable

powder produced during the

atomization process by over 40 percent." Efficiency gains of just a

few percent usually are enough to get

congratulatory memos flying around.

At the same time, Eisen added, the

new process consumes less argon gas,

"helping to decrease Crucible's

operating costs." That's just good

business.

54
NIST

Industrial

Impact

Company,

Gas Processors Association

Tulsa, Oklahoma

business:

Represents member companies who

produce, process, and distribute

natural gas and natural gas products

Size:

Approximately 60 member companies

The National Institute of

Standards and Tec\r\r\o\o^ is an agency of the U.S. Department

of Commerce's Technology

Administration. NIST promotes

U.S. economic growth by working

with industry to develop and apply

technology, measurements,

and etandarde.

August 1994

When Kepler came to the startling

conclusion that planets rotate around

the sun in elliptical orbits, not

circular ones as everyone had

believed, he owed plenty of thanks to

his employer Tycho Brahe. Brahe had

spent years measuring planetary

positions with unprecedented

precision. Had that precision been a

fraction of a percent less, Kepler

almost certainly would have failed to discem the unexpected orbital shape.

Now, there are countless

down-to-earth reminders of how

important precision can be, including one that has brought the Gas

Processors Association's (GPA)

member companies into alliance with

researchers at the National Institute

of Standards and Technology (NIST).

The collaboration, which began in

1989, goes by the descriptive title of

Volume Correction Factors Project.

The industrial problem that brought

the two organizations together

originated with disagreements

between the companies that sell

so-called liquid natural gas products

such as ethane, propane, butane,

pentane, isohexane, and their blends

(which condense into liquid when

extracted from natural gas) and those

who purchase often huge amounts of

these to use as fuel or chemical

feedstocks. Says Dale Embry, a senior

engineering specialist with Phillips

Petroleum Co. in Bartlesville, Okla.,

and GPA liaison on the project: "The

settlement of disagreements between

the buyers, sellers, and regulators

were tying up resources that could be

better spent on other projects." By the

late 1980s, the problem was getting

expensive enough to move the GPA

into action.

The technical basis of the discrepancy

resides in calculations used to

determine the quantity of the liquid

product, which for practical reasons is

always metered by volume, rather

than mass. But since the density of

liquids varies with the temperature,

which means that a gallon of the

same product packs a different mass

of product on a hot day than it does

The financial

consequences are

great because the

c^uantitles of

material produced

and sold are so lar^e.

on a cold day, the metered volumes

need to be corrected to a standard set

of conditions that everyone agrees to. Though actual corrections are

relatively small, the financial

consequences are great because the

quantities of material produced and

sold are so large.

Members of the GPA decided they

needed to re-evaluate the correction

tables they had been using since the

1950s when they were compiled by an

engineer at Gulf Oil Co. Doing that

meant preparing liquid product

samples of precisely known

compositions and then carefully

measuring their volumes and masses

in the range of temperatures at which

these liquids might be pumped into a

buyer's tanker. In the late 1980s,

when they contacted NIST, they

believed the corrections carried a

1 percent uncertainty. To halve that

uncertainty, they needed

measurement experts, which they

55
knew they could find at NIST.

Moreover, since many GPA member

companies are multinational, they

wanted to develop correction

standards that would stand up to the

scrutiny of foreign standards

organizations. "This was another

crucial reason to work with NIST,"

Embry says.

Beginning in 1989, the company

contracted with a team of researchers

at NIST's Boulder, Colo., facility

to measure the density of liquid

natural gas components and their

mixtures. Collaborators at the

Colorado School of Mines have used

the detailed data, which even account

for the portion of material that

vaporizes into the free space of a tank,

to generate sophisticated

The data "have

resolved many

discrepancies in

the [previously]

available data."

mathematical models that GPA

members can use to calculate

corrections with a maximum

uncertainty of 0.5 percent. That is a

factor of two to four improvement

when compared to the previous

methods. The new lower uncertainty

translates into annual savings of tens

of millions of dollars due to reduced

claims tracking and settlement,

Embry says.

In a letter to W. Mickey Haynes, a NIST researcher who had worked on

the project since its inception, Embry

wrote that "we have gotten a bargain

from your laboratory in terms of the

quantity of data measured for the

money that we have contributed." In

the letter, he points out that the data

"have resolved many discrepancies in

the [previously] available data."

Moreover, he says, the improved data

and correction calculations even have

allowed companies to keep open some

operating stations that would have

required costly upgrades in metering

systems to improve measurement

accuracy. "With the new data, we will

be able to continue to use less

expensive metrology with reduced

uncertainty," Embry says.

Precise measurement, it seems, is the

key to discovering the cosmic paths of

planets, cost-saving methods for

major industries, and, undoubtedly,

a few other things in between.

56
NIST

Industrial

Impact

Company.

Hewlett Packard Company

Greeley Hardcopy Division

Greeley, Colorado

business:

Manufacturer of high-tech

measurement, research, and

business instruments

Number of Employees:

750

The National Institute of

Standards and Technology is

an agency of the U.S. Department

of Commerce's Technology

Administration. NIST promotes

U.S. economic growth by working

with industry to develop and apply

technology, measurements,

and standards.

February 1994

In January 1992, engineers at

Hewlett Packard (HP) Co.'s Greeley

Hardcopy Division detected some

disturbing signs in one of their

product lines. Five months earlier,

they had stunned the electronic

communications community with a new and uncommonly affordable

color scanner, an instrument that

could convert a color image, or

regular text, into a digital format.

Once digitized, images or texts can be

fed into electronic publishing

software, multimedia packages, or

whatever else the electronic

communications moguls might come

up with.

"This kind of product had been

available for $30,000 to $50,000, and

we brought it down to the $2,000

range," notes Virgil L. Laing,

manager of reliability engineering

in Greeley's Hardcopy Division.

Moreover, HP was then, and still is,

the only U.S. company to have

successfully entered the scanner

market, which had been totally

dominated by companies in Japan

and Singapore.

HP's role as the lone Western player

in the field only amplified the

unnerving news trickling in from a

small proportion of scanner

customers. After several months of

trouble-free operation, one or two out

of a hundred users found that the

copyboard glass—the pane of glass

on which scanned material is placed

like a page to be photocopied

suddenly cracked, from one comer to

the comer diagonally across.

The news—both alarming and

puzzling—was a call to action to

Laing and a colleague who took on

the unexpected challenge full time.

"At first we thought our packaging

might have been inadequate and that

the cracks were occurring in

shipping," Laing recalls. The natural

inclination to wishful thinking, in

this case, that a simple packaging fix was the solution, helped favor this

hypothesis. But it also was reasonable

In January 1992,

engineers at

Hewlett Packard Co.'s

Greeley Division

detected some

disturbing signs in

one of their

product lines.

because it just wasn't easy to break

the copyboard glass. "We dropped it and we shocked it, but we didn't see any breaks," Laing says. "We literally

couldn't break the glass unless we

treated it so badly that it shattered."

Developing and evaluating the next

tier of hypotheses took the special

knowledge of a mechanical engineer

especially familiar with glass and that

meant going outside the group that

had designed the scanner. The

company hired a consultant in

nearby Boulder who had designed

spacecraft windows, which have to be

as mgged and fracture resistant as

glass can get. The consultant didn't

solve the problem, but he suggested

they call Harry McHenry, chief of the

NIST Materials Reliability Division.

They did. McHenry listened to the

problem and then connected Laing

57
with Robert Walsh, a specialist in

materials fracture at the NIST lab.

On March 12, 1992, Laing, two other

HP engineers, and a few scanners

traveled to Walsh's laboratory where

James Dally, a mechanical engineer

on sabbatical from the University of

Maryland, happened to be working as

a guest researcher. In less than a day,

the ad-hoc trouble-shooting caucus found the root of the problem.

Measurements with strain gauges

indicated that the design of the top,

which has to secure the glass in the

machine, unexpectedly had

introduced damaging levels of stress

into the glass. Instead of a safe level of

200 pounds per square inch (psi),

some parts of the glass were under

2000 psi. With that inforaiation in

hand, "we did more research, got

engineering manuals from Dow

Coming [a glass manufacturer],

and checked with Dally some more,"

Laing recalls.

In little more than a month after the

NIST visit, the designers at HP learned

what gremlin had caused the

cracking. The original design

included a molded plastic part that

He estimates that

their visit to the

NI6T lab and access

to top experts in

the field of fracture

mechanics saved

them 4 months of

time and expense.

put pressure on the comers of the

glass to secure it in place. It seemed a

reasonable way to meet the

company's stringent shock and

vibration specifications to prevent

damage during shipping or

intermittent rough treatment by

users.

A consequence of this design decision,

though, was to set the stage for a

subtle kind of failure mechanism in

glass that begins with what engineers

call "static fatigue." At the comers of

the copyboard, the extra pressure

designed into the machine elicited

microscopic cracks that, over time,

merged into a single crack that

ultimately sliced across the

copyboard. The result: glass that

breaks slowly rather than shattering

instantaneously.

The solution was simple, clear, and

inexpensive. "We redesigned the cover

plastic, and the problem went away,"

Laing says. He estimates that their

visit to the NIST lab and access to top

experts in the field of fracture

mechanics saved them 4 months of

time and expense. Luckily, the

fracture problem only affected a small

percentage of the machines. But the

scanners were selling well enough

that Laing estimates the 4-month

head start on the solution saved the

company at least $500,000. The static

fatigue flaw was an unexpected

difficulty, but it is the type of problem

likely to arise as companies develop

more sophisticated and complicated

instmments that demand more and

more of the materials used to make

them. The key to success, Laing says,

rides both on preempting problems

before they happen and, if that fails,

on finding good solutions quickly.

5&
NIST

Induatrial

Impact

Company:

Intel Supercomputer Systems Division

Beaverton, Oregon

business:

Develops and sells supercomputers

Number of Emplpyees:

Several hundred

The National Institute of

Standards and Technology is an agency of the U.S. Department

of Commerce's Technology

Administration. NIST promotes

U.S. economic growth by working

with industry to develop and apply

technology, measurements,

and standards.

May 1994

People who use supercomputers are

speed freaks. When a program runs more slowly than they think it should,

they quickly want to uncover and

overcome the computational

bottlenecks. Is the problem in the way

the software is written? Or is the

hardware simply pushed to its limits?

Answers to questions like these are at

the heart of business decisions such as

whether to buy new computers or

invest in software engineers.

Sniffing out the source of a

computer's performance snags is

especially tricky when it comes to

parallel processing supercomputers,

says Wayne Smith, a software designer

working at Intel's Supercomputer

Systems Division in Beaverton, Ore.

To help its customers through the

thicket, Intel began shipping its new line of Paragon parallel

supercomputers in 1993 with a

built-in "performance monitor"

based on work by researchers at the

National Institute of Standards and

Technology (NIST). Says Smith:

"Without the NIST effort, we wouldn't

have had this in our machines so

soon."

Measuring performance in a

conventional serial processing

computer such as a PC is relatively

straightforward. These computers

usually have a single microprocessor

that takes one line of a program at a

time and does what that line

commands—retrieve data from

memory or plug data into a mathematical expression, for

example—before moving on to the

next program line. If operators want

to speed things up, they might find

the computational slow points by

checking the computer clock from

time to time and noting how the

computation is proceeding. They

might leam, for example, that the

computer is not getting data out of

memory as fast as the processor can work on the data. If they can't

circumvent the problem by doctoring

the program to shunt data around

more efficiently, then they would have

to decide between patience and

purchasing a new computer with

faster retrieval from memory.

"Without the

NI5T effort, we

wouldn't have

had this in our

machines so soonJ

when it comes to parallel processing

supercomputers, uncovering

bottlenecks is much more difficult.

Instead of the neat linear process

going on inside of a serial

supercomputer, a dizzying

computational orchestration

unfolds when a parallel computer

runs programs. Each of dozens,

hundreds, or even more processors

simultaneously receives input from

other processors or from memory,

transforms data in accordance with

the part of the overall program it happens to be running, and sends

output to different processors,

memory, and other components.

This frenetic activity might cycle an

indefinite number of times. Moreover,

these events often do not occur during

the same time intervals in each

processor.

In this far more complicated arena,

finding out where bottlenecks arise

59
has been virtually impossible, Smith

says, partly because no single clock was available that was universally

applicable to all of the processors as a program ran. That is why he saw

good prospects in the "MultiKron

Project" of Alan Mink and colleagues

at NIST. The MultiKron is a chip (or

system of chips) that collects

perfomiance data as directed by

processors as they compute and shunt

data around. One of its functions is a

universal clock that can effectively

track program progress and compare

performance of all processors in a

computer. Says Smith: "You need

global counters and time stamps to know when and where things are

occurring" in a parallel processing

computer.

NIST has been developing MultiKron

technology at relatively low

manufacturing cost by relying on

small batches of prototypes made on a

nationwide chip fabrication resource known as MOSIS, which enables chip

designers to pool the cost of

manufacturing if each participant can live with only a few dozen copies

of its respective chip.

That's where the

design concepts

behind NIST's

MultiKron may

well come Into

his company's

maiden product.

That wouldn't work for Intel, which

would need many chips for each of its Paragon supercomputers. Intel found

that the lowest cost way to provide the

MultiKron functions they desired in

the high volumes that they needed was to hire a contractor to adapt an

off-the-shelf programmable chip.

"Now all new machines [Paragon

supercomputers] have a performance

monitor."

Newcomers to the parallel

supercomputing field also have their

eyes on the NIST MultiKron Project.

Tera Computer Co. in Seattle expects

to launch its own supercomputer late

in 1994, says Tera systems designer

Allan Porterfield. "We believe that to make the impact on the market that

we would like, we have to make it easy

to program our machine," Porterfield

says. That's where the design concepts

behind NIST's MultiKron, if not

actual MultiKron chips, may well

come into his company's maiden

product. That companies so far seem

to be opting for the brainwork behind

MultiKron rather than the chip itself

is just fine to Mink, who continues to

develop MultiKron concepts with

input from computer scientists at

universities as well as companies. It's

getting out there and seems to be

helping the parallel supercomputing

industry. And that is precisely the kind

of technology transfer we like, he says.

60
NIST

I nduatrial

Impact

Company.

Intelsat

Washington, D.C.

business:

International communication

satellite organization

Number of Employees:

133 member countries

The National Institute of

Standands and Technology Is an agency of the U.6. Department

of Commerce's Technology

Administration. NIST promotes

U.S. economic growth by working

with industry to develop and apply

technology, measurements,

and standards.

August 1994

To spacecraft designers, any visible

amount of unidentified gunk

showing up in development and

testing phases has a knack for

sending blood pressures to orbital

heights while keeping would-be

satellites down to earth. Better to get

to the bottom of the problem when

the spacecraft is in reach instead of

anxiously wondering, perhaps for

years, if the same dirt-making process

will eventually tum a multimillion

dollar spacecraft into a useless

assemblage of high technology.

That is why engineers at Intelsat, an intemational organization with

133 member countries and

21 communications spacecraft in

orbit, were mightily concemed when

they noticed a brownish

contamination on "reaction

thrusters" of a few yet-to-be launched

spacecraft. Flight controllers fire these

small thrusters to fine tune the orbital

orientation of deployed spacecraft.

Without working thrusters, the

spacecraft's communications

perfonnance could be impaired at

least or entirely muted at worst.

The problem surfaced in ground tests

as a "brown goo" corrosive to steel

valves on the thrusters. The corrosion,

in tum, was causing volatile

propellant to leak around the

thrusters' Teflon seals, says Andrew

Dunnet, a principal scientist at

Intelsat. Before the problem was

noticed, one satellite was launched

into orbit, which means it may have

contaminated valves. "We have seen no problems as yet," he notes, adding

that his organization now wants to

learn as much as possible about the

contamination to help them predict

what the orbiting satellite might do in

the future and to help their engineers

prevent future contamination

problems.

This is no easy task since the amount

of the brown goo is small despite the

potentially catastrophic scenarios it

elicits for those who depend on the

spacecraft. To help out, Intelsat hired

Tom Kirkendall, an independent

The data proved

c^uite instrumental

in the making of

engineering and

management

decisions which

materially affected

the reliability of

many spacecraft.

consultant with decades of experience

in spacecraft materials. He knew

about NIST's sophisticated

instmmentation and expertise in

analytical techniques (partly because

he used to work for COMSAT, which is

a short distance up the road from

NIST's Gaithersburg headquarters)

and suspected that researchers there

could help decipher the nature and

cause of the contamination.

In mid-April 1994, he met with Edgar

Etz and Robert Fletcher of NIST's

Surface and Microanalysis Science

Division and Bruce Benner of the

Organic Analytical Research Division.

Within a month, these researchers

had supplied Kirkendall with a number of preliminary results.

The data proved quite instmmental in

the making of engineering and

61
management decisions which

materially affected the reliability of

many spacecraft, Kirkendall says.

Based on 30-year-old reports in the

scientific literature about similar

contamination on spacecraft

materials, Kirkendall suspected that

the brown goo might form from

chemical reactions between the

thruster fuel (mono-methyl

hydrazine) and a chlorofluorocarbon

(CFC) that the manufacturer of the

thruster had been using to clean out

the thruster assemblies after test firing

them. To test the theory, Kirkendall

needed data. He had some, but not

enough.

Intelsat previously had hired

commercial analytical laboratories to

help determine the source and effect

of contamination on other thmsters.

While those analyses revealed the

elemental composition of

contaminants, they did not pinpoint

the specific corrosive species or

reactions at work on the thmsters.

Intelsat needed more detailed

information to decide if they could

use the existing thmsters after

cleaning them or if they needed to

replace them with nevercontaminated versions.

Models of the chemistry occurring at

a CFC-cleaned valve suggested that

both hydrogen fluoride and

"With NIST as part

of the effort, we

were able to decide

that we had to

change attitude

thrusters and we

were able to do

that in a minimum

of time."

hydrazones, which contain carbon

atoms that are bonded to nitrogen

atoms, likely would form on the steel

surfaces. The chemistry perpetrated by

these molecular species is thought to

be capable of corroding some steel

alloys. Without data to back them up

though, such models do not impress

aerospace engineers in charge of

keeping real satellites healthy for

their projected 17-year lifetimes.

Getting that data is where Kirkendall

hoped the NIST team could came in.

"I don't know where else I could have

tumed," he says. In one analytical

technique known as laser microprobe

mass analysis (LAMMA), Robert

Fletcher repeatedly blasts

micrometer-sized samples with a

finely focused laser beam, each time

creating a miniature plume of

material. The molecular debris is

then swept after each blast into an instmment that measures the masses

of each molecular fragment by

measuring how long the fragments

take to reach a detector.

In another technique, infrared

microspectroscopy, data about the

types of chemical bonds present in the

goo were collected without even having to remove sample particles

from the contaminated thmster

components.

"We now have information on the

chemical groups present and these

data have essentially confirmed our

hypothesis" that residual CFC and

propellant react to form the brown

goo, Kirkendall says. "With NIST as

part of the effort, we were able to

decide that we had to change attitude

thmsters and we were able to do that

in a minimum of time," Dunnet

notes. Moreover, the thmster

manufacturer no longer uses the CFC

to clean components after test firings,

he notes. Now, Kirkendall and Dunnet

hope that the NIST analysts can help

answer more specific questions about

exactly what chemical compounds

are present and whether this type of

corrosion process will continue in a

space environment, or if it requires

oxygen.

"Contamination is always a nightmare" in the space industry,

Dunnet says. It would seem that NIST

has gotten into the business of

helping some members of the space

industry sleep a little better.

62
NIST

Induatrial

Impact

Company.

Lake Shore Cryotronics Inc.

Westerville, Ohio

business:

Manufacturer of measurement and

control instruments for research,

medicine, and industry

Number of Employees:

90

The National Institute of

Standards and Technolo^ is an agency of the U.S. Department

of Commerce's Technology

Administration. NIST promotes

U.S. economic grov/th by working

with industry to develop and apply

technology, measurements,

and standards.

February 1994

In 1987, the term superconductivity

became part of the household lexicon.

Coming in by radio, newspaper, and

television were visions of a new

technological era ushered in by

breakthrough materials called

high-temperature superconductors.

If these strange ceramic materials

could be developed into forms such as

wires and coils, they just might

supersede and surpass the copper and

silicon-based electrical and electronic

technologies that have come to

characterize these times.

Insiders knew even then that the new

materials were far from a sure bet,

and realistic projections had scientists

and engineers taking a decade or two

before any part of the technovision

stood a chance. Still, no company

that had the potential to be involved

could afford not to pay attention.

Lake Shore Cryotronics (LSC), a small

firm in Westerville, Ohio, that makes

and sells a variety of sensors and

specialty electronic components, was

one of them.

Right in the middle of those heady

days in 1987, company employees Jeff

Bergen and Warren Pierce were

setting out on a multistop trip to find

new and future markets relevant to

LSC's strengths. That's also when LSC

president John Swartz received a

call from a colleague at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

suggesting that the trip itinerary

include Fred Pickett's research

group at the NIST Boulder facility. It

turned out to be a key stop.

When the LSC team got into the

laboratory, they saw an experimental

instrument that the NIST group was

using to measure electrical and

magnetic properties in the new

superconducting materials, recalls

Bergen. Nothing came of the visit

immediately, though Bergen and his

colleagues cataloged the instmment

in their memories since they knew

that superconductivity, and sensors

for studying the phenomenon, were

probably going to be growth fields.

A few months later during a phone

conversation between LSC and NIST

scientists, the commercial possibilities

of the instrument that the LSC troupe

had seen, called an AC susceptometer,

came up. The NIST group was finding

their instmment so useful in their

experiments that they suspected

others studying and developing the

new superconducting ceramics would

The NIST ^roup was

finding their

instrument so

useful in their

experiments that

they suspected

others studying and

developing the new

superconducting

ceramics would feel

the same way.

feel the same way. Moreover, a number of groups, mostly in Europe,

were already putting their own

homemade AC susceptometers to

work. The instrument uses an

altemating electrical current (AC)

to impose a magnetic field on a sample while monitoring how the

sample responds to, and interacts

63
with, the field. The data from these

experiments reveal electrical and

magnetic features of the sample,

including its superconducting and

non-superconducting properties.

After studying the possibilities, and

drawing heavily on the experience of

the NIST group, the LSC staff

concluded that AC susceptometers

"could be built and sold at more

accessible prices than anyone could

build themselves in the laboratory,"

Bergen says. LSC scientists and

engineers conferred with the NIST

group regularly and within

1 year—by mid-1988—LSC had

built and sold the first commercially

manufactured AC susceptometer. "We

tumed it into a tum-key instrument,"

Bergen says. The company followed

LSC scientists and

engineers conferred

with the NIST

Qroup regularly and

within 1 year, LSC

had built and

sold the first

commercially

^manufactured AC

susceptometer.

that in 1991 by unveiling an AC

susceptometer combined with a DC

magnetometer, a related instrument

that the U.S. research community is more familiar with.

These instruments since have been

sold to many labs around the world

and have contributed greatly to the

rapid growth of Lake Shore's

magnetic measurements product

lines, Bergen notes.

As it tums out, the more sober

projections for high-temperature

superconductivity remain on target,

Bergen says. A few small applications

of the materials in products

such as magnetic field sensors

(superconducting quantum

interference devices, or SQUIDS for

short) for oil prospecting and medical

imaging could emerge before 1997

comes around, but widespread and

large-scale use remains uncertain.

That uncertainty has changed the

business context for LSC, notes

Bergen. "The cryogenic market [for

instruments that work at extremely

frigid temperatures] is having a lesser

rate of retum," Bergen notes.

"We are now looking beyond

traditional markets," Swartz adds. It

is that kind of adaptive behavior that

could well transform business

uncertainty into opportunity.

64
NIST

Induatrial

Impact

Company:

Lockheed Missiles & Space

Company Inc.

Sunnyvale, Califomia

business:

Designers of aerospace technologies

and vehicles

Number of Employees;

15,600

The National Institute of

Standards and Technology is an agency of the U.S. Department

of Commerce's Technology

Administration. NIST promotes

U.S. economic growth by working

with industry to develop and apply

technology, measurements,

and standards.

August 1994

Sometimes researchers at the

National Institute of Standards and

Technology (NIST) get letters fit for

their mothers' refrigerators. Charles

Tilford, an expert in measuring

extremely low pressures, and his

vacuum metrology group received

such a letter in May 1994 from a team

of measurement specialists at Lockheed Missiles & Space Co. Inc.

in Sunnyvale, Calif.

The company has wanted to develop

a confident in-house means of

certifying ultralow pressure

measurements of their vacuum

chambers in which they routinely

observe and test components, even

entire spacecraft, under pressure

conditions similar to what the

hardware would encounter in orbit

and outer space—about

1 ten-billionth the pressure on Earth.

To make sure the readings of their

hundreds of pressure gauges are

accurate (the gauges read the correct

pressure) and precise (the variation

range from measurement to measurement is very small),

Lockheed has a strictly enforced

policy to send their in-house

calibration instrumentation to the

vacuum group's laboratory at NIST's

Gaithersburg facility twice each year

where // can be calibrated with

unsurpassable confidence.

For Lockheed, an aerospace company,

the initial push for in-house pressure

standards, which would enable more

frequent and convenient calibrations,

arises mostly from design and

engineering requirements imposed by

the National Aeronautics and Space

Administration for certifying space

station components. But calls for ever

more reliable pressure measurements

also are coming from several other

industrial sectors, including the vast

microelectronics industry, notes Klaus

Jaeger, manager of metrology for

Lockheed.

The technical challenge is to develop

a standard source of low pressure,

which then can serve to calibrate the

gauges used to monitor the tiny

amount of gas in the company's

Calls for ever more

reliable pressure

measurements also

are coming from

several other

industrial sectors,

including the vast

microelectronics

industry.

vacuum chambers. The strategy is

similar to a company that makes

rulers. To make sure the marks on the

ruler actually correspond to

centimeters or inches, the

manufacturer relies on length

standards that ultimately are

traceable to standards maintained at

national standards facilities such as

NIST.

The vacuum metrology group

developed its pressure standards by

designing and building devices that

deliver precisely known flows of gas

through apertures of known area. Under proper conditions, the pressure

throughout each chamber becomes

equal to the pressure at the aperture,

which is calculated by dividing the

measured flow rate by the known

65
area. Researchers at Lockheed and

elsewhere regularly send vacuum

gauges to the vacuum group. Flight

hardware now in place aboard the

Hubble Space Telescope,

communications satellites, and other

spacecraft have been certified in

vacuum chambers whose pressures

were measured with gauges whose

calibrations are traceable to the NIST

standard.

Now, Lockheed is about to wean itself from this ultimate reliance on NIST.

In a letter to Tilford dated May 9,

1994, Jaeger and two Lockheed

co-authors, Paul Levine and

L. Kasturi Rangan, reveal that their

company is now poised to cut the

umbilical cord and in a way that

could well open up important new

business for them.

"Lockheed is in the process of

commissioning an ultrahigh vacuum

primary calibration system, designed

after the NIST system," they wrote in

the letter. "Without the drawings,

technical specifications, and details of

the process used to fabricate critical

components provided by your

[Tilford's] group, our system could

not have come together and reached

testing phase in the relatively short

time it has taken." Many of the

important details, which never show

"The entire vacuum

group is a jewel in

the U.S. crowny

up in written documentation for any

high technology, were transferred

during visits to NIST and multiple

off-the-cuff calls. "Chuck [Charles

Tilford] was always more than willing

to give me advice," Levine notes.

Lockheed engineers working on the

project "have always received a warm

welcome, in-depth help and advice,

and cooperation as though we are all

partners in the same business," the

letter states.

Indeed, the company foresees several

business benefits emerging from all of

this interaction. Since their new

calibration system can serve as a means of "primary calibration," the

Lockheed engineers no longer will

have to send their vacuum gauges to

NIST's Gaithersburg facility every

6 months. That will amount to an

annual savings of $40,000 for the

company, notes Levine.

That cost saving could well become

incidental to a much larger benefit

that the engineers expect from their

in-house calibration system. "It will

afford us the capability of providing

calibrations of [ultralow] vacuum

gauges on a commercial basis,"

Levine says. Such certifiable

measurements are important not only

for aerospace companies but also for

chip makers and others who deposit

thin layers of materials under highly

controlled temperatures in vacuum

chambers. "This will put us in an enhanced competitive position," says

Jaeger.

Tilford notes that the microelectronics

industry also is getting much more

serious about accurately measuring

the conditions in their manufacturing

processes. These processes can involve

hundreds of steps to produce

chip-filled wafers, each of which

represents tens of thousands of dollars

of presale investment. When problems

arise, many wafers are discarded

before the solutions are found, and

that costs plenty. Getting more

understanding and control over the

process steps, many of which are at

low pressures, is a route to fewer

losses, less downtime, and better

products. Tilford is not surprised

that much of his team's efforts now

focus on helping chip companies

develop more sophisticated

pressure-monitoring protocols.

"The entire vacuum group is a jewel

in the U.S. crown," Jaeger says. Adds

Levine: "I cannot say enough good

things about them." That's definitely

commentary fit for the fridge.

66
NIST

Induatrial

Impact

Company:

Maxtor Corporation

Longmont, Colorado

3uemeee:

specializes in producing data

recording products

Number of Employees:

6,200

The National Institute of

Standards and Technology is an agency of the U.S. Department

of Commerce's Technology

Administration. NIST promotes

U.S. economic grovvth by working

with industry to develop and apply

technology, measurements,

and standards.

July 1994

Virtually every byte of data in all

of the computers in all of the

homes, offices, laboratories, and

manufacturing floors in the world is

stored on exquisitely thin magnetic

films. These films most often are

frosted atop palm-sized aluminum

disks that subsequently become the

organs of memory in computer hard

drives. In 1992, the hard disk drive

market amounted to $24.5 billion,

according to statistics from the

Department of Commerce.

Since an individual byte on a typical

disk resides on an area roughly the

size of a red blood cell, any

manufacturing defect big enough to

be seen with the naked eye is a red

flag to anyone in the business of

selling the disks. And that is just what

happened in early 1993 to engineer

Michael Montemorra of Maxtor Corp., one of the country's "Big 5"

producers of hard disk drives. While

visiting the company's facility in

Singapore where disks, heads, and

other components are assembled into

"plug-and-play" hard drives, he

leamed that some of the disks

arriving at the factory from suppliers

had clearly visible ring-shaped defects

circling through the disk's data

storage areas. The disks should have

appeared perfectly smooth and shiny.

Though the problem was neither

widespread nor catastrophic, "it gave

us a small yield problem," notes

Montemorra. It was a glitch familiar

in the industry and one that had been

insidiously eating into profits.

Montemorra decided to get to the

bottom of the problem and hopefully

solve it. First he questioned the disk

suppliers, but they couldn't pinpoint

where the problem resided. So when

he got back to Maxtor engineering

offices in Longmont, Colo.,

Montemorra and co-workers began

examining defective disks with

conventional analytical tools,

including scanning electron

microscopy for looking closely at

surface texture of the disks and

electron diffraction for examining the

crystal structure of the magnetic

films. Still, nothing obvious was

showing up.

At about the same time, Jim Lytton, a

senior materials scientist at Maxtor,

had established a research agreement

with a group of researchers at the

National Institute of Standards

and Technology, just 32 kilometers

(20 miles) down the road in Boulder.

He and others at Maxtor had known

about NIST for awhile, but when

Maxtor would ^et

access to new tools

for equality control

and basic research

that could help

them to Improve the

equality of their

products and to

remain competitive.

Lytton heard that NIST mechanical

engineer Paul Rice was using an

atomic-force microscope (AFM) for

looking at magnetic materials, he

decided the time was right to initiate

a collaboration. Maxtor would get

access to new tools for quality control

and basic research that could help

them to improve the quality of their

products and to remain competitive.

67
At the same time, NIST researchers

would leam more about the technical

problems of data storage technology

and could better assist U.S. players in an important global industry.

Montemorra hoped that access to an AFM and to an expert user might help

solve the defect problem. The AFM

held that kind of promise because it can create renditions of sample

surfaces down to the atomic scale. It

does this by dragging an extremely

fine stylus across the surfaces like a

blind man sweeping a cane back and

forth to determine the lay of the land.

In the NIST AFM, a laser beam

trained on a flat reflective plate on the

back of the stylus deflects into a

detector as the stylus follows the

microscopic hills and valleys on the

sample surface. From those

deflections, a computer constructs an image of the surface. None of the

analytical techniques in Maxtor's own

labs could reveal the surface structure

with as much detail as the AFM.

"We asked them [Rice and NIST

colleague John Moreland] if they

could see anything funny about the

defective disks with their AFM,"

Montemorra recalls. In short order.

The AFM images

that Rice produced

at NIST's Boulder

facility were pivotal

in helping Maxtor's

suppliers uncover

where their

processes had been

falling short.

Rice produced revealing AFM images

of the defective disk surfaces. When

Montemorra sent these to the

suppliers who actually made the disks

for Maxtor's Singapore factory, the

defects soon began disappearing.

"You had to go right to the

people who were involved in the

manufacturing process," Montemorra

notes.

The problem, it tums out, resided in an intermittent failure to meet the

specific conditions under which the

magnetic films are deposited onto

the nickel-plated aluminum disks.

The deposition occurs inside a vacuum chamber. There, a strong

electromagnetic field transforms a

cloud of gas atoms into minuscule

bullets that slam into a piece of metal

whose composition is the same as the

magnetic alloy needed to coat the

disks. The sputtered metal atoms then

reassemble onto the blanks in thin

magnetic films that can store data

when a magnetic field is applied to

them.

Getting the process to work

consistently as part of a commercial

manufacturing process begins as a maddening empirical exercise of

varying the chamber temperature, the

strength of the electromagnetic field,

and other conditions until good

magnetic films are produced. Once

found, that hard-won set of

conditions then serves as the key to

the manufacture of high-quality

magnetic films. In Maxtor's case,

those films translate into millions of

dollars worth of disk drives each year. Montemorra and Lytton say that the

AFM images that Rice produced at

NIST's Boulder facility were pivotal in

helping Maxtor's suppliers uncover where their processes had been falling

short.

With that win in the track record,

Maxtor engineers say they are looking

forward to continuing work with

NIST. The NIST researchers also have

plenty of experience with a magneticforce microscope (MFM), which they

have been using for an even longer

time than their AFM. The MFM can image a material's magnetic

landscape on the same fine scales

that the AFM can image a material's

topography. With these dual windows

on magnetic materials, NIST

researchers believe there are prospects

for additional payoffs for Maxtor and

other companies.

6&
NIST

Industrial

Impact

Company:

optical E.T.C. Inc.

Huntsville, Alabama

business:

Developer of infrared-based

technologies for military and

commercial applications

Number of Emplpyees:

5

The National Institute of

Standanie and Technology is an agency of the U.S. Department

of Commerce's Technology

Administration. NIST promotes

U.S. economic grovvth by working

with industry to develop and apply

technology, measurements,

and standards.

March 1994

Networking works, sometimes when

you're not even trying. R. Barry

Johnson, a former professor of

electrical engineering who now calls

himself an infrared technologist, can

tell you so. The results so far from

an unexpected collaboration with

researchers at the National Institute

of Standards and Technology, he says,

are accelerated progress for his

company's R&D and $3 million of

research funding from the Navy.

What Johnson and his main NIST

collaborator, Michael Gaitan, are

developing might be thought of as minuscule stoves having hundreds of

bumers and made out of tiny silicon

chips, aluminum, and a few other

ingredients. Their experimental

models today consist of square arrays

of "microheating elements," together

with microcircuitry that controls the

pattem and intensity of heating,

all on a chip about the size of a

telephone number button. Johnson,

Gaitan, and other collaborators

expect to make much larger arrays

involving more than 16,000

individually controllable heating

elements. The tiny devices are made

by adapting mature microfabrication

techniques developed originally by

the microelectronics community.

The initial goal of all of this

microstovery, Johnson explains, is to

develop an inexpensive, versatile, and

reliable technology for "dynamic

thermal scene simulation," which is

the art of emulating the thermal

energy emissions of objects or even complex scenes like tanks on patches

of desert. The Department of Defense,

which has supported both Johnson

and Gaitan's work for years, is moving more and more toward

simulation and emulation

technologies like this one as a

hopefully cheaper and less risky

means of testing equipment and

training personnel.

Johnson and Gaitan both envision

using their microfabrication skills

for non-military uses as well

sensors built into wings, bridges, and

even shipping crates that monitor,

locate, and record damaging

vibrations; chip-sized sensors that

simultaneously sense the presence

and amounts of many different

pollutants in the air; or

accelerometers for mechanisms that

control and trigger air bags in cars.

These possibilities

are accelerating

a\0Y\q the R&D

process faster than

would have been

possible had they

not been networked

several years ago.

Gaitan and Johnson say these

possibilities are accelerating along

the R&D process faster than would

have been possible had they not been

networked several years ago by an Army contract officer working at

Redstone Arsenal, Ala. The Army

happened to be supporting both

researchers for different projects.

When Gaitan traveled to Alabama to

discuss his project, the Army contract

officer arranged for Gaitan to meet

Johnson, intuiting that the two might

cook up good ideas relevant to the

Army's needs. Who could predict what

69
could emerge by mixing people with

expertise in infrared optics, electrical

engineering, and microfabrication?

Plenty, it seems. For the first 2 years

after their initial meeting, Johnson

and Gaitan maintained informal

contact by phone, e-mail, occasional

visits, and the like. It was during that

time that they began developing and

testing their ideas for mass-produced,

microfabricated thennal arrays. In

1992, Johnson and NIST made their

connection somewhat more formal by

signing a Cooperative Research and

Development Agreement (CRADA),

which Johnson and Gaitan say has led

to several tangible benefits. As a result

of their joint work on thermal

displays, NIST is in the process of

applying for a patent, an involved and

tedious process that Johnson says he

"This relationship is

in principle what

Congress intended"

with its legislation

to make the federal

government's

research assets

more accessible to

private companies,

Johnson notes.

and his company, Optical E.T.C.,

would not have pursued on its own.

Moreover, Johnson credits his

association with Gaitan as a major

factor in a Navy decision to fund a

project in which the two are

co-principal investigators in an effort

to take their thermal-imaging

prototypes to the next stage of

development. The funding will span

3 years beginning in FY 1995 and will

amount to about $3 million. Johnson

notes that his company already has an agreement with a Califomia

company, Santa Barbara Infrared, to

distribute commercial products that

may come out of the collaboration.

"This relationship is in principle what

Congress intended" with its

legislation to make the federal

government's research assets more

accessible to private companies,

Johnson notes. "With this type of

assistance and motivation, I think we

will have a much stronger country."

70
NIST

Induatrial

Impact

Company.

RolfJensen and Associates

Deerfield, Illinois

State Fire Marshal

St. Paul, Minnesota

Donald Belles and Associates

Madison, Tennessee

business:

Fire protection

The National Institute of

Standards and Technology is an agency of the U.S. Department

of Commerce's Technology

Administration. NIST promotes

U.S. economic growth by working

with industry to develop and apply

technology, measurements,

and standards.

August 1994

Every year fire wages war on the

United States. In 1992 alone, nearly

2 million fires killed 4,730 people and

injured 28,700. The National Fire

Protection Association (NFPA), which

releases grim statistics like those each

year, estimates the property damage

caused by these 1992 fires at well over

$8 billion.

Yet these numbers only hint at the

full cost of fire. Business interruptions

and closings, insurance and

litigation, fire protection and fighting,

adhering to construction and

manufacturing codes and standards,

and disaster recovery sum into a

national cost that one recent

govemment-commissioned report

estimates to be over $100 billion

each year.

That is a compelling incentive for fire

researchers and fire protection

engineers to develop tools for

predicting the outcome of fires, says

Tom Brace, Minnesota's State Fire

Marshal. He says that predictive tools,

if used properly, can save lives, save money by giving more latitude to

building designers, and save

businesses millions of dollars in

liability suits, which are traditionally

hard to defend against.

One of the tools that Brace uses more

and more is called Hazard I, a fire

simulation program developed by

researchers at the National Institute

of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Into the model go data about a

building's design, materials,

fumishings, occupancy, and the

nature of the fire. Out come

predictions about the temperature,

smoke and toxic gas concentrations

in each room, and the likely loss of

life and injuries. The development

team even included a psychologist to

help with the human behavior

components of the model. Since 1988

when the original version of Hazard I was released, over 500 copies have

been sold to fire marshals,

engineering finms, consultants, and

others in the fire research, litigation,

prevention, and fire fighting

communities. The program—now

sold in its second upgrade—never

Programs like

Hazard I and

FPEtool ... have

become Important

components of big

decisions that

Influence court

settlements, liability

claims, and

even entire

state economies,

will replace the judgment and

experience of human beings, Brace

stresses. But he adds that programs

like Hazard I and FPEtool, another

NIST production, have become

important components of big

decisions that influence court

settlements, liability claims, and even

entire state economies.

One high profile case in point is the

new and enormous Mall of America

in Bloomington, Minn., which

opened in 1992. According to the

mall's publicity office, more people

will visit the Mall of America each

year than Disney World, and it is

expected to be a major source of

71
revenue for the state. Since tens of

millions of people will be visiting the

facility each year, Brace wanted to be

extra sure that everything about the

mall was as safe as possible and

complied with regulations. That is why in late 1993 he sought out Jack

Snell, deputy director of the NIST

Building and Fire Research

Laboratory, at an NFPA meeting in

Phoenix. Brace needed an objective

second opinion on the calculations

and simulations used by RolfJensen

and Associates (RJA) of Deerfield, III, whose fire protection engineers

worked on the design and fire modeling of the Mall of America.

Snell asked Richard Bukowski, a fire

protection engineer at NIST, former

firefighter, and co-author of Hazard I,

to help out.

A key question for Brace was whether

people on the mall's fourth level,

which hosts a l6-screen cinema and

many large restaurants, would have

enough time to evacuate the building

if a fire began, say, on the second

level. From their analyses using the

NIST prediction tools, RJA was

confident that the answer was yes, but

Brace wanted to make sure that the

assumptions and data RJA engineers

put into their computer models were

appropriate and that RJA's

interpretations were sound. He also

wanted to check out a few more

scenarios without having to do fullscale smoke tests in the mall, which

Brace says are "pretty disruptive and

may not be an accurate indicator

anyway." The models helped Brace to

validate RJA's work and deem the

Mall of America fit to be occupied.

NIST predictive

models are helping

the company

capture big jobs on

high-rise buildings in

Singapore, Hong

Kong, and Jakarta.

"I didn't base my decision on the

model, but it was a key element that

had to come up positive."

As for RJA, the prediction and analysis

tools are helping the company

capture big jobs on high-rise

buildings in Singapore, Hong Kong,

and Jakarta where Bukowski says

"designers, owners, and regulatory

officials recognize the fire safety

record of U.S. high-rise buildings."

RJA engineer Bill Webb concurs. "Anyone [in the building engineering

and design] business who wants to

claim they are current with design

technology would have to have a

knowledge of these tools."

The NIST fire prediction tools also are changing the context of product

liability litigation stemming from

fires. Claims that a particular product

or material present at a fire scene

contributed to an injury or death, for

example, are difficult to confirm or

refute based on investigations that

rely entirely on human judgment.

The NIST fire models have made it

possible "to assess the relative role of

a specific material or product in the

loss, freeing those whose product had

no impact and limiting the liability

for those whose role was small

compared to other factors," Bukowski

says.

Several small carpet firms that had

been caught up in such suits owe

their continued existence in part to Hazard I and FPEtool, claims Donald

Belles, a fire protection consultant in

Madison, Tenn. He says he has

successfully absolved several carpet

mills from liability using NIST's

predictive models. The models have

become an integral part of the way

Belles does business.

Jon Nisja, one of Brace's deputies,

points to yet another important role

that predictive tools are beginning to

play. Safety officials are slowly

moving away from rigid, prescriptive

building codes that stipulate in detail

precisely where electrical outlets,

lighting fixtures, vents, and other

building components have to be

placed during construction. Better,

Nisja says, are the more flexible

"performance- based codes" that

consider the hazards unique to each

building. This approach ought to lead

to buildings that are safer, less

expensive to build, and make more

sense for their occupants and users. It

also requires more skilled analysis by

code and safety officials since they no

longer can simply pull out a book of

specifications. "This is where models

developed primarily by NIST have a

great deal of advantage for code

officials," Nisja notes. What's more,

when he has problems with the

program he knows where to tum for

help. "NIST is extremely customer

oriented," Nisja notes. "I have called

for help on numerous occasions and

my experience has always been very

positive."

72
NIST

Induatrial

Impact

business:

The steel industry

Number of Employees:

180,000

The National Institute of

Standands and Technology is an agency of the U.S. Department

of Commerce's Technology

Administration. NIST promotes

U.S. ecor\om\c growth by working

>vith industry to develop and apply

technology, measurements,

and standards.

March 1994

Steel. It is the strength and stability of

skyscrapers and bridges spanning

miles. It is the stuff of machine tools

and mass manufacturing. It is the

material of this century's two

gargantuan war efforts. It is big, big

business. In 1991, the U.S. steel

industry sold $27.3 billion worth of

material and, even after dramatically

paring back its workforce, employed

over 180,000 at 83 companies that

shipped 78.8 million tons of steel.

From the early years of the century,

the National Institute of Standards

and Technology (known as the

National Bureau of Standards until

1988) has been woven intimately into

the evolutionary process by which

steel has become one of the most

reliable, most used, and most

important materials of the age. Basic

steel is made from iron whose normal

carbon content of 4 percent or so by

weight is reduced to usually less than

1 percent and whose properties are

extremely sensitive to precise

differences in composition. Special

alloys depend on specific additions

of other elements such as chromium

for stainless steel, or chromium,

tungsten, and vanadium for

particularly hard tool steels. The

central challenge of the industry is to

produce the desired amount of steel

with the specified properties with the

greatest possible efficiency.

To some industry representatives, the

most consistent and crucial kind of

assistance that NIST has lent comes

in the form of Standard Reference

Materials, or SRMs as they are known

in the trade. NIST ships over 125

steel-related SRMs that manufacturers use for calibrating

instruments and validating in-house

measurements of their products'

chemical composition and physical

properties such as hardness and

electrical resistivity. Most of the

steel-related SRMs are chips, disks,

powders, or rods of steel alloys whose

chemical composition has been

measured with exceptional precision

and accuracy.

In 1993 alone, NIST shipped 5,963

SRMs related to the chemical

composition of steel alloys. These

SRMs are as central to a steel company's operations as a tape measure is to a carpenter. "We use

these things [SRMs] every day," says

Thomas Dulski, a senior analytical

chemist at Carpenter Technologies

Corp., a century-old specialty steel company in Reading, Pa., which

"It would be a

different and lesser

industry if it had

not been for NI5TJ

supplied steel cables to the Wright

Brothers and now specializes in

high-end steel alloys for such things

as surgical implants and parts for air

bag systems. "I have worked in the

industry for 30 years and I could not

imagine the last 30 years without

[SRMs and] interaction with NIST. It would be a different and lesser

industry if it had not been for NIST."

Makers of huge volumes of basic steel

rely just as heavily on NIST's SRMs,

notes Dulski, who also is chairman of

the steel analysis committee of ASTM

(American Society for Testing and

Materials), a voluntary standards

organization through which

73
industries develop consensus on technical issues such as manufacturing and testing practices.

"Without those SRMs, their

operations would be virtually

impossible," Dulski notes.

The NIST connection with the steel

industry reaches nearly as far back as

NIST's creation by Congress in I9OI

when the steel industry was still maturing from its industrial roots a

few decades earlier.

At the time, railroad accidents were

occurring at a rate of over 4,000 each

year, causing an annual average of

almost 13,000 deaths and injuries

between 1902 and 1912. The blame, it

seemed, rested with broken rails,

wheels, flanges, and axles pushed to

failure by a combination of excessive

loads, inadequate maintenance, and

The steel industry

now regularly

interacts with

NIST via cooperative

research

arrangements,

consortia,

workshops, troubleshooting sessions,

and other

collaborative

mechanisms.

inferior iron and steel. Besides

subjecting specimens from railroad

disasters to chemical, mechanical.

and microscopic investigations to uncover the bases for good and bad

metal, NIST began supplying the

steel industry with some of the first

"standard materials," which

companies used to better control the

properties of their products. That was

the start of an extended relationship

between NIST and the steel industry,

which Dulski says only becomes more

critical and diverse today. Besides

using SRMs, the steel industry now

regularly interacts with NIST via

cooperative research arrangements,

consortia, workshops, troubleshooting sessions, and other

collaborative mechanisms whose

common goal is to improve existing

technologies and to develop new ones.

It would seem that this NIST-industry

connection is as strong as steel.

74
Malcolm 3a\dr\Qe

National Quality

Award Program

Impact6

75

NIST

Induetrial

Impact

Malcolm 3a\dr\Qe

National Quality

Award FVogram

The National Institute of

Standansls and Technology is an agency of the U.S. Department

of Commerce's Technology

Administration. NIST promotes

U.S. economic growth by working

with industry to develop and apply

tec\r\no\o^, measurements,

and standards.

March 1994

By the 1980s, many industry and

govemment leaders in the United

States firmly believed that a renevi^ed

emphasis on quality was no longer an

option for American companies but a

necessity. An ever growing world

market was, and is, demanding

quality goods and services. But many

American businesses either didn't

believe quality mattered for them or

didn't know where to begin.

To accelerate a small, slowly growing

U.S. quality movement, the Malcolm

Baldrige National Quality Award was

established by Congress in 1987 to promote quality awareness, to

recognize quality achievements of

U.S. companies, and to publicize

successful quality strategies.

The Baldrige Quality Award program,

developed and managed by NIST

with the cooperation and financial

support of the private sector, has

proven to be a highly successful

govemment and industry team effort.

Over the past 6 years, the award

program has encouraged thousands

of U.S. companies to adopt quality

improvement strategies. According to

a recent report by the Conference

Board, a private business membership

organization, "A majority of large

U.S. firms have used the criteria of the

Malcolm Baldrige National Quality

Award for self-improvement, and the

evidence suggests a long-term link

between use of the Baldrige criteria

and improved business performance."

While quality management cannot

guarantee success, the Baldrige award

winning companies and many others

believe that investing in quality can

lead to outstanding retums, both for

individual companies and the

country.

For example, Thomas N. Kennedy, an

executive with Solectron Corp., says, "We embraced the Baldrige criteria in

1989 and continue to use it as a

template for process improvement as

well as for driving leadership and

employee involvement in all aspects

"The evidence

euQQeete a

long-term link

between use of the

3a\dr\Qe criteria

and improved

business

performance."

of quality. As a result, annual revenue

has increased over threefold in the

last 4 years, from $130 million to $407 million. ... Net income has

increased from $4.3 million to

$14.5 million ... jobs have increased

from 1,500 to over 3,700 and

Solectron's customer satisfaction

index grew to 93 percent." Based in

Califomia, Solectron, a 1991

Baldrige Award winner, provides

manufacturing services to the

electronics industry.

In the early 1980s, senior

management at Ames Rubber Corp., a

1993 Baldrige Award winner, realized

that the international marketplace

was changing dramatically. The

NewJersey company of about

450 employees produces rubber

rollers for office machines and highly

specialized automotive parts. Even

though the firm was doing well both

77
in Europe and the United States, its

customers were demanding products

that met more exacting quahty

requirements at lower prices. Offshore

competition was emerging, and it became evident that business as usual

would not suffice.

With help from Xerox Corp., its prime

customer, Ames Rubber instituted a new work process in 1987 based on

quality management. Their success

can be measured by a 3-year,

48-percent increase in productivity, a

defect rate that has plummeted from

30,000 parts per million in 1989 to

just 11, and savings from teammate

ideas of over $1.2 million in 1993

alone.

Another 1993 Baldrige Award winner,

Eastman Chemical Co., also looked to

quality management as a way of

getting back on track after losing

market share of a major product in

the late 1970s. Employing over

17,000, the company used the

Baldrige Award criteria to help define

its quality culture and regain its

competitive edge.

Eastman Chemical is indeed

competitive. For the past 4 years, over

70 percent of its worldwide customers

have ranked Eastman as their

number one supplier. Of the five

factors customers believe are most

The three publicly

traded whole

company 3a\dnQe

winners

outperformed the

Standard & Poor's

500 from the time

they won through

Sept. 30, 1993, by a

factor of 5.6 to 1.

important—product quality, product

uniformity, supplier integrity, correct

delivery, and reliability—Eastman

has been rated outstanding for

the past 7 years. And, quality

management helped the company

reduce the time to bring a new

product to market by 50 percent

since 1990.

Says company president Eamie

Deavenport, "Eastman, like other

Baldrige winners, didn't apply the

concepts of total quality management

just to win an award. We did it to win

customers. We did it to grow. We did it

to prosper and to remain competitive

in a world marketplace."

Other Baldrige winners have similar

stories:

At Federal Express Corp., a 1990

winner, ideas from Quality Action

Teams have saved the company

almost $29 million.

At 1988 winner Globe

Metallurgical, exports have grown

from 2 percent to 20 percent of sales

from 1988 to 1992, while overall sales

grew by 24 percent.

Customer accounts at Granite

Rock Co., a 1992 winner, have

increased 38 percent from 1989

through mid- 1993.

Since 1987, Motorola Inc., a 1988

winner, has increased its sales from

$6.7 billion to $17 billion. In

addition, the company has added

18,000 employees and productivity

has increased 126 percent. Also, by

reducing manufacturing defects.

Motorola has saved $4.6 billion since

1987 in manufacturing costs.

According to an article in the

Oct. 18, W5,Bmness Week, the

three publicly traded whole company

Baldrige winners outperformed the

Standard & Poor's 500 from the

time they won through Sept. 30, 1993,

by a factor of 8.6 to 1.

7&
Index of Companies

Accuwave 9

Air-Conditioning and

Refrigeration Institute 41

AlliedSignalInc 17

Amersham/MediPhysics 43

Ames Rubber Corp 77

Analogy Inc 45

AT&T 17

AT&T Bell Laboratories 51

Bristol-Myers Squibb 43

Carpenter Technologies Corp 73

CEMCoip 49

Chrysler Corp 47

Clipper Diamond Tool Co. Inc 27

Coastal Technologies Inc 35

Coming Inc 51

Cmcible Compaction Metals 53

Dee Inc 29

Diamond Semiconductor Group ... 11

Donald L. Belles and Associates Inc. . 71

DuPont Merck Pharmaceutical .... 43

Eagle-Picher Research Laboratory . . 13

Eastman Chemical Co 77

E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co 41

Federal Express Corp 77

Ford Motor Co 47

Gas Processors Association 55

General Motors Corp 47

GenPhann Intemational 15

Globe Metallurgical 77

Granite Rock Co 77

Hewlett Packard Co 57

HJE Co. Inc 31

Intel Supercomputer Systems Division . 59

Intelsat 6l

Intemational Business Machines Corp. 17

Lake Shore Cryotronics Inc 63

Lockheed Missiles & Space Co. Inc. . . 65

Mallinckrodt Medical 43

Maxtor Corp 67

Minnesota State Fire Marshal 71

Motorola Inc 77

National Center for

Manufacturing Sciences 17

Nonvolatile Electronics Inc 19

Nordion Intemational 43

Optical E.T.C. Inc 69

Packard Instmments 43

Prime Tube Inc 33

Rolf Jensen and Associates 71

Sandia National Laboratories 17

SDL Inc 21

Solectron Corp 77

Spartanburg Steel Products Inc 35

Syncor Intemational 43

Tera Computer Co 59

Texas Instmments Inc 17

Thomson Berry Farms 37

United Technologies/

Hamilton Standard Corp 17

Xerox Corp 21

X-Ray Optical Systems Inc 23

79
Index of Applications

Aluminum manufacturing 29

Analytical instrumentation 23,49,63

Biopharmaceuticals 15

Composite materials manufacturing 47

Computer-aided design 45

Data and image scanning 57

Datastorage 19,67

Electronic materials (printed wiring boards) 17

Electronics/semiconductors 11,19,69

Fire control engineering 71

Food manufacturing 37

Manufacturing, general 27,31,35

Materials reliability 57, 6l

Microengineering 69

Natural gas products 55

Optoelectronics/photonics 13, 21

Powder metallurgy . . 31,53

Power electronics 45

Precision machine and tool manufacturing 27

Pressure measurement . 65

Quality management 77

Radiopharmaceuticals 43

Refrigerants (CFC altematives) 41

Sensors 19,69

Simulation software 45,71

Steel manufacturing and forming 33,35,73

Supercomputer diagnostics 59

Telecommunications 9, 51

* U.S. (MVERNMEIIT PBIimirG OFFICE: 199A - 300-633 - 814/22624

60
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE

Ronald H. Brown, Secretary

Technology Administration

Mary L. Good, Under Secretary for Technology

National Institute of Standards and Technology

Arati Prabhakar, Director

National Institute of Standards and Technology

Gaithersburg, Md. 20899-0001

(301) 975-2000

Boulder, Colo. 80303-3328

(303) 497-3000

September 1994

NIST Special Publication 872

Prepared by the Public Affairs Division

SP 872 Staff: Ivan Amato, Michael Baum,

Mark Bello, Virginia Covahey, Susan Ford,

Jan Kosko, Sharon Shaffer, and Sheila St. Clair

Any mention of commercial

products is for information only; it

does not imply recommendation or endorsement by the National

Institute of Standards and Technology

nor does it imply that the products

mentioned are necessarily the best

available for the purpose.
Nisr