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Testing tools of the trade: Pullman company making its mark by giving students and industry a way to test products
PULLMAN, Jul 11, 2010 (The Lewiston Morning Tribune - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) --
A robot rolling around the floor turns as Steven Haber tilts an iPad.
Haber and two fellow college interns at Digilent Inc. analyze every nuance of the robot's performance. "Why does it reset when it runs into things? That's so weird," said Haber, a Missoulian, who will be a senior at Washington State University this fall. The others wonder about the robot's stability and consider changing the placement of its batteries.
Students at WSU made the robot for trade shows as a gimmick to attract potential customers to Digilent's booth. The circuit board that controls the transistors is one the company sells to students and educators. The boards allow a student to convert a virtual software design into the real thing and test the end result.
The creativity the students tapped for the project has been a key factor in the success of Digilent, which was recently chosen by Seattle Business Magazine as the manufacturer of the year in the small company category, said Clint Cole, one of the company's founders.
"I've never really had a job," said Cole, who is also an engineering professor at WSU. "I've just done stuff people like and people paid me."
The business has been profitable since its founding in 2000. Gross sales doubled each year from 2000 to 2006 before leveling off to annual growth of about 20 percent. It has 25 full- and part-time employees in Pullman, with about 20 in Romania, China and Taiwan.
The microprocessors for testing software or field-programmable gate arrays for testing computer chips that go into the circuit boards that Digilent makes have been available for decades. But the technology was so finicky that experienced engineers often struggled to troubleshoot for problems.
It was also expensive and outside the budgets of most college students. Cole and Gene Apperson, who has also taught engineering at WSU, invented the first boards as teaching aids for their own classes at a time when the cost of the technology was declining dramatically. "All we brought to the table was recognition that we could build low-cost design kits around these core technologies and make them easier for students or anybody to use," Cole said.
It wasn't Cole's first exercise in taking a complex operation and simplifying it for a broader audience.
The former emergency medical technician helped design the controls, readouts and screens for automated external defibrillators. The defibrillators reduce the task of restarting someone's heart to something even the untrained can do.
The goal of the circuit boards is almost exactly the opposite of the defibrillators -- to give students or hobby-level inventors a way to test their approaches. The circuit board was the starting point for students who redesigned every Nintendo game ever issued and could allow people to build their own radios or computers.
The unintentional venture grew by word of mouth. Those in the academic community got wind of the circuit boards Apperson, a former Microsoft employee, and Cole were using in their classes. Soon they were getting requests for them from professors at other institutions.
Initially they sent the components at cost, but found they got so many questions about the assembly that they started putting them together.
Even though it was a nonprofit activity, all the FedEx traffic through the offices of Cole and Apperson raised questions from WSU administrators that were easiest put to rest by forming an independent company.
They found contractors overseas to do the assembly to keep the price of the basic boards around $125, which is similar to that of a textbook for an engineering course.
It would have remained a venture that simply sought to break even had it not been for an encounter that Cole had at a development meeting at a private company in San Jose, Calif.
Cole overheard a marketing expert complaining in the lobby that he had a great chip design but no cheap way to prove it to customers. Cole butted into the conversation and told the engineer he could get him demonstration boards for $5 each.
His intrusion turned into a sale of 10,000 of the boards.
"That was what launched the company," Cole said.
That type of business represents about half of Digilent's operations, subsidizing the educational sector by keeping prices as low as possible.
The company is constantly exploring new ideas, such as a device for analog engineering that does what the circuit boards did for digital engineering. Analog engineering goes into complex operations that can record or produce sound, motion or light. "There's more variables and fewer constraints. The infrastructure of doing this is more expensive."
Cole and Apperson will continue to hone their products at Digilent. "Hopefully we invented tools that let people recreate the wheel."
Williams may be contacted at ewilliam@lmtribune.com or (208) 848-2261.
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