Article about the company from the Wilmington News Journal:
For Them, Innovation is a Family Value
The News Journal
Wilmington, DE
May 19, 2005
By Steven Church
The Goetz family is trying to uncork a bottleneck on the Internet.
Frederick Goetz Jr. and his parents, Frederick and Mary, run a small public company in Wilmington that is trying to perfect a key piece of Internet hardware to take advantage of the new fiber-optic cables telecommunications companies like Verizon are connecting to homes around the country.
PSI-TEC Corp. is among a handful of developing technology companies racing to develop a plastic modulator that converts electrical signals from a computer into light pulses that travel over fiber-optic cables at 186,000 miles a second.
The winner will attract the attention -- and the wallets -- of some of the biggest technology buyers in the country, from the regional phone companies and their cable rivals to the Department of Defense.
That's because plastic modulators have the potential to overcome a built-in limit to how fast data can be moved onto fiber-optic cables, said Larry Dalton, a professor of chemical and electrical engineering at the University of Washington. Fiber-optic cables can transport huge amounts of data nearly instantaneously, but before a signal can get onto a cable, it has to be converted to a pulse of light.
Today, costly crystal-based modulators are used to convert electrical signals that carry data from computers, sensors and other electronic equipment into light pulses.
Plastic modulators would not only be faster, but potentially much cheaper, Dalton said. Modulators made from crystals typically cost between $10,000 and $20,000, the younger Goetz said. Plastic modulators could cost less than $1,000, he added.
PSI-TEC is based around technology developed by Goetz' father, Frederick Goetz Sr., an organic chemist who has worked for the DuPont Co. The elder Goetz is the four-person company's chief technology officer and he continues to lead PSI-TEC's research effort. Mary Goetz, who is also a former DuPont employee, runs many of the company's computer systems and helps with laboratory testing.
The younger Goetz said that, early in his career, he didn't want to follow his father's scientific path.
"As a kid I really learned to hate chemistry," said the Concord High School and University of Delaware graduate. "I went into physics. That was my big rebellion."
Eventually they discovered that their interests converged, the younger Goetz said.
"We ended up working as a fantastic team in the end," he said.
The company was founded in 1991 and for many years was funded with contracts for the U.S. military, which has long had an interest in developing plastic modulators for satellites and other data-intensive electronics.
Last year, PSI-TEC registered as a public company with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the younger Goetz said. The company currently has no sales or military contracts, but is being funded by a recent stock sale and by Universal Capital Management Inc. of Wilmington.
Several large companies, including DuPont, explored plastic modulators in the 1990s, but gave up when the telecommunications boom died, said Joe Perry, a professor of chemistry for the Georgia Institute of Technology. Today the research is being continued mostly by smaller companies like PSI-TEC and Lumera of Bothell, WA.
Recent advances in public and private laboratories have shown the technology has promise, said Perry, who is a science advisor for Lumera.
"The interest is growing again," he said.
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