Silicon Fen innovations that will soon be in a shop near you
A matchbox-sized projector to use with a laptop. A no-wires pad that recharges your mobile as you sip a cappuccino. A flexible sheet of plastic that displays the latest news. A treatment for baldness.
These are a few of the latest technologies under development in the Cambridge Cluster of High-Tech companies.
So much of the ground-breaking design and innovation in the region known as Silicon Fen is not visible to people as they go about their business each day. Many are 'black box' products that are hidden within now commonplace products and medical treatments.
Black box innovators
Heavyweight ARM supplies designs chips that are the electronic brains, such as 16/32-bit RISC microprocessors, for advanced wireless, networking and entertainment digital gear. Its partners shipped a mind-boggling 499 million chips in the last three months of 2005.
CSR has the Bluetooth market all but sown up. Its BlueCore devices are in over half all Bluetooth devices shipped worldwide. Its customer list reads like a who's who of global electronic giants - Nokia, Dell, Panasonic, Sharp, Motorola, IBM, Apple, NEC, Toshiba, RIM and Sony feature on it.
Autonomy Corporation's mathematics-inspired software powers applications dependent upon unstructured information. It works well in the business world of call centres, customer relationship management systems, knowledge management, online publishing and in security applications, amongst others.
Cambridge Display Technology is a pioneer in using light emitting polymers for very large electronic screens that are brighter and clearer than anything seen in railway stations or on the large outdoor screens such as the one at Wimbledon on Henman Hill.
Silicon Fen has long been known for its advances in ink jet printing technology and Xaar remains at the forefront of new applications, delving into new areas that include CD printing and ID cards.
And on the biotech side, Cambridge Antibody Technology recently became the first UK biotech company to produce a blockbuster drug - meaning its anti-rheumatic drug Humira had sales of over US$1 billion a single year.
Some 'visible' new gear
But a swag of young companies are working on products that might soon be in the local shopping centre with the firm's logo on the outside.
Light Blue Optics has designed a matchbox-sized video projector using a revolutionary laser technology that steers rather than blocks light. The battery-powered device will plug into (and a smaller version eventually be embedded inside) a mobile phone, a laptop or camera and project an image onto any surface
CEO Nic Lawrence says his firm's vision “is to make it simple for people to share photos with their friends and to comfortably view mobile TV and music videos from their mobile devices. We believe that access to a large display, such as is provided by our PVPro projection technology, is key to increasing ease of use.”
Then there's Splashpower. They have designed a pad that can be plugged in anywhere and recharges mobile phones, digital cameras, MP3 players and laptops (as long as they a small receiver module inside) that are simply placed on the pad. No wires, no connections. They want the world to gear up for this so that cafes, hotels, cars, you name it, have a 'splashpad' installed for customers to get a quick recharge while they sip their cappuccinos.
Lily Cheng, Splashpower's Co-Founder and CEO, says the company's “focus is on humanizing technology. The new generation of consumers are looking for a richer experience but with less complexity. The new generation of consumers care about design and lifestyle.
"Technology is like cosmetics," she says, "the less visible, the better."
While the phone is recharging you could be reading an e-newspaper - not on your laptop screen, but on a flexible, paper-like thin sheet of plastic. Prototypes have been made by PlasticLogic (see the picture at the top of this article) as large as A5 and with high resolution.
And an active, updating e-newspaper in a flexible plastic sheet might not be far off. Plastic Logic already has the technology and this month it joined forces with over 20 international publishing houses in a three-year initiative called the 'e-News project' to explore the changing needs of mobile media consumers and how to harness the business with the new technology.
Plastic Logic CEO Stuart Evans says he's "delighted to be working with the newspaper community" to ensure his firm's plastic electronics technology meets their requirements for mobile e-readers.
Intercytex is a specialist cell therapy company pioneering, among other things, a hair cloning treatment for baldness. Called ICX-TRC in its development stage, it will no doubt have a more user-friendly moniker when it eventually gets to the market through hair transplant centres.
In the ICX-TRC therapy, a sample of hair follicles is taken from the patient during a simple half hour operation done out under local anaesthetic. Cells responsible for forming new hair are separated from the sample and placed in a special solution (developed by Intercytex) for three weeks. They are then injected into the patient's scalp. Three months later, the patient should see new hair growth.
Intercytex says Phase I clinical trials (which monitor safety) have been completed in seven volunteers at a single UK transplant centre. No safety issues arose and five out of the seven patients have shown increased hair numbers. A Phase II clinical efficacy trial on balding men is planned to start soon.
