October 21, 1999
Tech Center
Venerable Hewlett-Packard Labs
To Drop Its 'Aw, Shucks' Attitude
By DAVID P. HAMILTON
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Hewlett-Packard Co. is jazzing up its venerable corporate laboratory. And it
wants the world to know about it.
H-P Labs, as the computer maker's research arm is known, certainly has an
illustrious history. Founded in 1966, the lab is credited with creating the first
pocket calculator, the first programmable calculator and important
technologies for both ink-jet and laser printers. But for much of the past 30
years, its researchers have labored in relative obscurity, both as far as the
outside world was concerned and even within H-P itself.
"H-P as a company, as well as H-P Labs, has tended to be kind of quiet
about its achievements," says Dick Lampman, the laboratory's current
director. "In fact, that's kind of an understatement."
Mr. Lampman hopes to change all that. Since
taking the reins at the lab from current H-P Chief
Scientist Joel Birnbaum earlier this year, the
soft-spoken computer scientist has pushed the laboratory to focus its research
efforts more tightly in hopes of making significant breakthroughs, as well as to
talk more openly about its activities.
"We're going to make some big bets," says Marvin Keshner, director of the
lab's computer-products division.
One example of that is H-P's research into the science of digital photography,
which is already starting to yield new techniques that H-P plans to incorporate
in digital cameras. That work is driven by a particular vision: that digital
photographs will soon be superior to those taken on film.
Adjusting Exposures Instantly
That may sound like a long shot, given that most digital cameras to date yield
grainy pictures that don't enlarge well. But Larry Hanlon, director of the lab's
printing-technology department, argues that research into the technology of
how color is displayed and algorithms that compensate for different light
conditions will lead to digital cameras that adjust each picture as it is taken,
eliminating the overexposed or underexposed shots that most people take for
granted these days.
H-P's decision to focus research efforts on digital photography wasn't without
controversy. "In the early days, there was a lot of skepticism, given the
established technology in photography and concerns about how digital
technology could overtake it," says Mr. Lampman. "It involved devoting a lot
of resources over a sustained time to get results."
Another case in which the lab has focused its efforts on a single big goal is the
"Cool Town" project, an attempt to create a "pervasive" computing
environment using only the basic technologies that underpin the World Wide
Web. By shunning specialized or proprietary techniques, researchers Gary
Herman and Jeff Morgan argue that Cool Town demonstrates a way to easily
link personal computers, hand-held devices and other "information
appliances" in cars, homes and offices, using technology that is already widely
accepted.
'Ubiquitous Computing'
"It enables ubiquitous computing with the Web as a platform," says Mr.
Morgan. That effort, in fact, has become a hub for other research initiatives at
the labs that also aim at using the Web as a technology standard, Mr.
Lampman says.
Further out is H-P's research effort into nanotechnology, the science of
building incredibly tiny devices that are often only a handful of atoms thick.
That work already created a stir in July, when H-P Labs researchers and
scientists at the University of California at Los Angeles demonstrated the
ability to build circuit elements called logic gates on a molecular scale.
That work, preliminary though it was, took researchers a big step toward their
long-held goal of one day "growing" chips and even computers from individual
atoms and molecules. Such "chemically assembled electronic nanocomputers"
could extend the computer industry's ability to keep building faster, cheaper
and smaller computers for decades, says Stan Williams, the principal scientist
in H-P's quantum-structures lab.
"Over the last 40 years, we've seen a 100-million-times shrinkage in [chip]
size and a 100-million-times improvement in power efficiency," Mr. Williams
says. "There's no reason we can't go for another 100 million."
H-P doesn't disclose how much it budgets for individual research projects.
The company says it spent $270 million on research at H-P Labs in 1998,
although that figure will likely drop once H-P spins off its
measurement-equipment arm as Agilent Technologies Inc. later this year.
Agilent will end up with roughly 40% of the researchers currently at H-P
Labs, a split that will reduce total employment at H-P Labs to 850 from about
1,400 last year.
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