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Sarnoff: past is prologue to futureby George Leopold The result of nearly six decades of research and development at Sarnoff is a lengthy list of consumer products that have quite literally changed the way Americans live.At the southern end of the great American research triangle dominated by Bell Laboratories and IBM's Thomas Watson Research Center, the former David Sarnoff Research Center is busy reinventing itself as the Sarnoff Corp. The television and CMOS pioneer has changed hands several times since the salad days of analog TV in the 1950s and '60s and the emergence of consumer electronics. But the spirit of intellectual curiosity and pursuit of the leading edge of product technology remains strong in the storied corridors of this gracefully aging complex next to Princeton University. The place is steeped in history, from its legendary founder, RCA Corp. Chairman "General" David Sarnoff — the Russian immigrant who became a key figure in the first half of the 20th century — to Richard Williams' and George Heilmeier's pioneering work on liquid-crystal displays and advances in charged-coupled-device technology. In between, Sarnoff Labs developed the first linear CMOS chips, eventually cranking out more of the devices than any other in history. 
One of the tasks of the managers of Sarnoff Corp., now a $140 million for-profit subsidiary of SRI International (Menlo Park, Calif.), is to preserve the laboratory's legacy of innovation while surviving in the cutthroat world of single-technology spin-off companies and contract research. "We operate at the edge of chaos," observes James Carnes, Sarnoff's amiable president and chief executive. The story of Sarnoff's transformation from a TV research lab into multidisciplinary incubator of new businesses is nicely illustrated by the "Princeton engine," a powerful machine in search of an application. Work on the 17-layer board began in the laboratories here in the mid-1980s. It was envisioned as a programmable PC for testing digital signal processing in new TV receivers. But the Princeton engine was considered so complex by TV engineers at RCA's Indianapolis manufacturing plant that its chances of working were no better than one in a million, said Carnes, who ran the Indianapolis plant. To his surprise, the Princeton engine developed by a handful of Sarnoff researchers not only worked well but became an enabling technology that eventually found its way into Sarnoff's recently unveiled Diva video server, a key component of the company's digital video strategy. A Sarnoff technology venture, Diva Systems Corp., is promoting interactive video-on-demand systems for the cable industry so it can offer access to more than 1,000 movies and other special programming. Sarnoff, a charter member of the HDTV Grand Alliance, played a key role in the bruising decade-long battle over digital TV transmission standards. The lab's bottom line was that the U.S. specification had to include packetized signals. Sarnoff's success in promoting that stand has laid the groundwork for datacasting huge amounts of information and other services over compressed digital TV channels. Now Sarnoff is trying to pursue new technology markets, betting heavily on healthcare technology with nearby pharmaceutical manufacturers. The idea is to apply decades of broadcast engineering experience in CMOS semiconductor technology to the healthcare industry. One of Sarnoff's 15 technology spin-offs, Orchid Biocomputer, is developing microfluidics technology for genetic diversity analysis of single nucleotide polymorphisms. SNPs are a natural, hereditary form of mutation. They represent the most common form of genetic variation that accounts for differences among individuals. SNP analysis can be used to improve existing drugs and to develop safer, more effective ones. Sarnoff's partners on the project include its digital TV partner Motorola Inc. and leading drug companies like Smith-Kline Beecham. Another medical effort that draws on Sarnoff's semiconductor expertise involves applying electrostatic deposition of dry powders, a technology Sarnoff developed for making color TV displays. The technique is being modified for the production of pills and other medicines with far more precise dosages. It is hoped the technology could save consumers money on costly drug prescriptions by making the delivery system much more precise. The company is also pursuing the medical device market through its Songbird Medical technology venture, which is trying to develop the world's first disposable hearing aid. The key barrier to wider use of hearing aids is cost and battery life. Today's custom-made hearing aids are designed to last five years and therefore cost retirees on fixed incomes a small fortune. Songbird hopes to introduce a disposable device later this year designed to last 30 days before being replaced. Hence, Sarnoff's mission of "changing the world with technology" is using years of TV and electronics experience to reduce the cost of healthcare, Carnes said. Moreover, none of Sarnoff's new ventures would be possible if it hadn't maintained its own flexible fab, company researchers emphasized. Indeed, nearly everything that is being pursued by Sarnoff's researchers-from medical electronics to MPEG decoders for HDTV-dates back to the hard-driving David Sarnoff and the CMOS pioneers of the 1960s. "Everything that happens depends on somebody with a passion — a champion," said Israel Kalish, a retired Sarnoff senior technical adviser who led the CMOS development effort at what was then RCA's Electronics Group in nearby Somerville. "Somebody has to put their ego on the line and make it happen." One reason RCA-Sarnoff researchers could move a risky technology like CMOS from the engineer's bench to the production line was that they all worked under the same roof, often just down the hall. "Five minutes in the hallway [exchanging ideas with a colleague] was worth more than all the experts in the world," Kalish recalls. Now, of course, design engineers attempt to recreate that type of collaboration virtually through concurrent design projects. The difference is one can't look a colleague in the eye to accurately gauge his response to a new approach. Those days, Carnes said, may be gone forever as the nature of technology research increasingly shifts from centralized efforts to more scattershot product development. Gone are the days, said Carnes, when a Sarnoff researcher in the 1960s could pursue seemingly far-out projects like alternative approaches to quantum mechanics simply "because it is interesting." There was "more 'R' than 'D' back then," the Sarnoff chief said. "Today, there is not as much 'R' and a lot of 'D' ". Carnes, who maintains close ties with his alma mater, Pennsylvania State University, said that's as it should be. Basic research should be left to universities, he said. Bottom-line-oriented companies have to remain tightly focused on product development to survive. If Iz Kalish represents the old guard at Sarnoff, Bill Mayweather, Sarnoff's managing director of IC systems, typifies the next generation. Mayweather, a Sarnoff scholar as an engineering student, heads teams working on the company's system-on-chip strategy, home networking, high-reliability designs and a handful of other projects that draw on technical expertise around the world. For example, one team is leveraging Sarnoff's vast experience with TV development to develop CMOS-based processors for other harsh environments that require high reliability. The key difference from the old days, Mayweather said, is that design cycles have to be compressed to complete products in time for key industry milestones like the Consumer Electronics Show. Current Sarnoff managers lack the luxury of time that their predecessors often enjoyed. Still, several generations of technology development provide Mayweather's team with one of its greatest strengths: the ability to generate intellectual property and to deliver it in the form of working hardware and software. As Sarnoff moves further away from the research model that produced a host of consumer electronics products, the company's engineers continue to build on the legacy of 60-plus years of product-oriented R&D. The Century of the Engineer: Companies that made a difference |
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