- HUNTSVILLE, Ala. - A little-known company in this city of rocket scientists
is about to explode onto the scene with an invention that might be as important
as the transistor or electric light bulb. The company is Time Domain. Its
breakthrough is the work of Larry Fullerton, a lone inventor who harks
back to the era of Thomas Edison. His invention is a way to transmit information
wirelessly, but not using radio waves. Instead, it uses pulses of radio
energy, fired out at 10 million to 40 million pulses a second.
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- The potential impact is astounding. If
the technology lives up to its promise, it would be like the leap from
vacuum tubes to the transistor or from oil lamps to light bulbs, touching
every home and workplace. Wireless communicators could get down to the
size of a quarter. Radar could become cheap and commonplace. A home radar
system could be used for security, detecting movement inside and distinguishing
a cat from a man. Already a reality is hand-held radar that police can
use to see inside a room before bursting in.
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- The pulse technology, sometimes also
called ultra-wide band (UWB), could launch whole new industries and reorder
several existing ones in coming decades.
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- "This is a technology that's as
radical as anything that's come up in recent years," says Paul Turner,
a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers who has studied Time Domain and advised
the upstart company. Others agree. Representatives from major technology
companies have trooped to Huntsville the past few months. "If they
can really pull it off in volume, it can be quite huge," says IBM
Vice President Ron Soicher, who admits to getting goose bumps when he realized
the potential.
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- The technology is digital. Each of the
whizzing pulses is a 1 or 0, so the transmissions are as flexible as a
computer, able to handle phone calls, data or video. The pulses can carry
information or media as fast as the speediest corporate Internet connection.
The pulse technology has other advantages:
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- * It could open up capacity for radio
communication. Today, there's a wireless traffic jam. Users of radio waves
have to operate in their specific, government-granted slices of the increasingly
crowded radio spectrum; otherwise, they'd interfere with one another. But
it's unlikely the pulses would interfere with each other or with conventional
radio waves, so the pulses would open up vast new radio real estate.
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- * Pulse devices could operate on one-thousandth
the power of devices that use radio waves, so a phone could be the size
of a wristwatch.
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- * The pulses in Time Domain's technology
are read by timing the incoming pulses to 10 picoseconds - 10 trillionths
of a second. Any pulse device could tell how long it takes for a signal
to get to it, which makes it able to sense objects and measure their position
more accurately than conventional radar. Radar could be a mass-market product
for homes or cars.
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- * The pulses are timed according to a
complex code shared only by the sender and the intended receiver. The chance
of anyone who doesn't have the code intercepting the signal is near zero.
That means pulse communications should be the most secure way ever to transmit
wirelessly - of major interest to the military.
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- Fullerton started working on the technology
in 1976 and got his first patent for it in 1987. But the technology was
crude, Fullerton didn't have the money to push it, and the world wasn't
paying attention. All that is changing in a big way.
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- Band of believers grows
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- In Time Domain's offices are prototypes
of a wireless phone that can measure the distance to the other party, cameras
that can transmit video wirelessly to a computer screen, and radar that
works indoors and through walls, which conventional radar can't do. The
prototypes are hand-built and clunky. "We haven't built a lot of things
yet, so we don't know how much reality will intrude on theory," CEO
Ralph Petroff says. "But our guys say they can do it."
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- The list of believers is growing. The
Federal Emergency Management Agency has contacted Time Domain because its
radar technology could pinpoint victims beneath an earthquake's rubble.
"This technology has the potential to reduce casualties among civilians
and rescue workers alike," says a comment FEMA filed with the Federal
Communications Commission.
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- The Marines have been looking at Time
Domain prototypes because they'd like a walkie-talkie that's not only undetectable
but can tell a Marine the location of all the other members of his unit.
The Immigration and Naturalization Service is doing a pilot project with
Time Domain. It's interested in ways the technology could be used along
the border. Put a wireless, low-power camera in a cactus, and it could
transmit video back to INS agents; no need to string telltale wires across
the desert.
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- A few pulse technology products are ready
for a broader market, pending FCC approval. Time Domain has made hand-held
radar that police could use to see inside a room before bursting in. A
couple of small companies are making pulse radar devices for measuring
liquid in steel storage tanks. A handful of research labs, such as the
UltRa Lab at the University of Southern California, are experimenting with
pulses.
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- Mass-market products are still years
away. Cell phones, Petroff predicts, are a decade off. "There are
still three to four iterations of design that have to go on before we really
know if it all looks good," says Robert Scholtz of UltRa Lab. "Still,
no one has disproved its potential." Recent developments are giving
the technology a head of steam.
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- Until about a year ago, Fullerton's invention
was, as he says, "a science project." It worked only in theory
or in awkward and costly lab experiments. Then IBM came up with a new way
to make a chip using the material silicon germanium. That chip turned out
to be perfect for measuring time to the picosecond and controlling release
of the pulses - at low cost. Working with IBM's Soicher, Time Domain became
a test project for the chip. "It's been a perfect match," says
Alan Petroff, brother of Ralph and head of Time Domain's engineering work.
"We wouldn't be doing this now if not for that." Another development
has to do with money, and lots of it. In 1995, Time Domain was an 11-person
Huntsville company that struggled to make payroll. Since then, the Petroff
family, which previously had built a multinational environmental engineering
company, invested $3 million and took over management. (Fullerton, who
admits he's an inventor, not a manager, still owns more than 20% of Time
Domain and is the company's most valuable asset.) The Petroffs have raised
an additional $17 million from dozens of investors, many from Silicon Valley.
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- The money has enabled Time Domain to
build prototypes, hire engineers, do some marketing and get to critical
mass. "They now have a backbone of credibility," says Heidi Roizen,
a powerful Silicon Valley player who has advised Time Domain and introduced
it to the computer and Internet crowd. "They proved their concept,
and they've gotten out to meetings" and people are taking them seriously,
she says.."
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- New industries, not old
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- Events this week are helping. Friday,
the House Science Committee is releasing a report that could clear up confusion
about the technology. For most of the 1990s, Fullerton has been in a patent
dispute <http://www.usatoday.com/news/acovfri.htm with the federal Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory. He alleges that Livermore tried to swipe
his pulse technology by applying for a similar patent in 1993. In a preliminary
ruling, the Patent Office has thrown out Livermore's key patent claims,
citing Fullerton as the true inventor. In Friday's report, the House Science
Committee will castigate Livermore for its behavior and say Fullerton is
the inventor.
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- Tuesday, Ralph Petroff gave a brief report
to FCC commissioners at their invitation. It was a sign that another obstacle
might begin to move. No one can even test a pulse-transmitting product
without approval from the FCC, and so far, the FCC has granted none. In
fact, the agency has been very wary of the technology, which doesn't fit
with anything it has experienced before.
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- The technology has come far enough to
let Time Domain and others begin thinking of ways Fullerton's invention
could change the world. Certainly the technology could have a profound
- maybe devastating - effect on several existing industries. Companies
in TV, radio and telecommunications have spent billions of dollars buying
rights to slots on the radio spectrum and billions more developing products
to use on those slots. It might take decades, but Time Domain's technology
could make those rights far less valuable and the products obsolete. "This
is really a paradigm buster," says Bennett Kobb, author of SpectrumGuide,
which keeps tabs on radio spectrum.
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- Time Domain, however, pointedly says
it's not trying to go at existing industries head-on. For one, it would
rather have companies like Motorola and AT&T as allies, not enemies.
"Time Domain has to try to get into the market in a manner that's
as nonthreatening as possible to other stakeholders, who will try to protect
their turf from any kind of alien thinking," Kobb says.
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- Second, Ralph Petroff says he's interested
in spawning new industries, not scrambling old ones. Time Domain wants
to use the Intel business model. It would make the internal chip set that
could power any product: Time Domain inside. Entrepreneurs and big companies
would come up with the innovative products based on the technology. Just
as no one could imagine how the transistor would be used when William Shockley
fathered its invention in 1947, no one knows how pulse technology might
be used.
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- But Petroff has some intriguing ideas.
For instance, the technology's ability to measure a position is so good,
it can be accurate to within less than an inch. That would allow for what
Petroff calls precision farming. Put pulse technology on a tractor, and
the vehicle could plow a field by itself. Or the positioning aspects might
allow for the creation of a self-guided bricklaying machine.
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- Time Domain technology could be perfect
for the blossoming industry of home computer networking. The single biggest
obstacle to home networking is the wiring: Who wants to string another
set of wires to every computer, printer, TV and other device around the
house? With pulse technology, you might be able to put a box on the side
of the house that would be powerful enough to transmit TV, the Internet
and phone calls to any device inside.
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- Tinkerer solves puzzle
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- The credit for all this rests with Fullerton.
Inventors like him seemed to have died with the complexity of the modern
age: one person, tinkering in a private lab, creating something entirely
new.
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- "He is a brilliant inventor, and
he does have a lot of the sort of Edisonian quality," says Turner
of PricewaterhouseCoopers.
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- Fullerton is 48, married, with two grown
children. He's had a lab since he was 7. His father was in the military,
and they moved a lot. His labs went with the family. At 13, he was introduced
to amateur radio by a neighbor at McChord Air Force Base in Tacoma, Wash.,
and was fascinated. He went to the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville,
Ark., where a favorite professor, Leonard Forbes, told the class one day
of a theory of pulsed communication. Research on the theory had been going
on for years. But, Forbes said, pulses could never be transmitted.
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- "I couldn't think of a reason it
wouldn't work," Fullerton says. And if it worked, he realized, its
potential would be awesome. He kept experimenting in his home lab until
one day he used pulses to transmit music - a tape of the album Chicago
III - from his workbench to a hand-held receiver in his yard. "When
it worked, I got kind of a spooky feeling," he says.
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- He got jobs with big companies - Texas
Instruments, ITT, CSC - and started a small, not-very-successful one. He
kept tinkering. CSC brought him to Hunstville, where he looked up a patent
attorney and won his first patent. He now has 10 U.S. patents for pulse
technology and 32 abroad.
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- Lanky and bearded, Fullerton comes across
as painfully shy, but underneath he is steely and wily. He met Alan Petroff
in the 1980s. Peter Petroff had come from Bulgaria to work with Huntsville's
rocket scientists building the U.S. space program in the 1960s. He then
invented the digital watch, founding Pulsar in 1969, and later built ADS
Environmental Services with his three sons, Ralph, Alan and Mark.
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- By 1995, Fullerton lured in Alan Petroff,
who took a $25,000 salary just to get in. A year later, the rest of the
Petroffs joined him. "We had all planned to retire," says Ralph
Petroff, now 44. The Petroffs brought money and management. Without them,
Fullerton's invention might have died.
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- Hurdles to history books
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- Time Domain still faces obstacles aplenty.
It needs to build more prototypes to prove without a doubt that the technology
works as advertised. So far, the company has encountered no serious glitches
in its march to do so. Time Domain also needs to carefully choose partners
- staying wary, as Roizen advises, of big companies that might then bury
the technology amid bureaucracy and infighting.
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- The FCC is a huge obstacle. Time Domain
has been trying to prove that pulse communications would not interfere
with other signals on the radio spectrum, but Scholtz says that's "still
an open question." The FCC has not yet granted Time Domain waivers
to test products. Commercial products will require a major rule change,
a process that can take two years. But the FCC is listening.
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- "I hope (that it would be approved),"
says John Reed of the FCC's technical rules branch. "There are quite
a few benefits that could be obtained from it."
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- And since Time Domain plans on building
innards, not products, "it must ignite the entrepreneurial community
so people will build these things," Roizen says.
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- But the technology seems to be on the
right path.
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- "Until a few years ago, I'd wake
up in the middle of the night and say, 'What am I doing?' " Fullerton
says. "But the way I feel now, there's no stopping it."
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