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Paul Franz
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Millivision emerges with passive airport security scanner
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Out of Western Massachusetts, home to one of the state’s lesser-known technology clusters, is coming a device that will ease air travel for modest road warriors.
Millivision Inc. of Deerfield has come up with an airport security scanner designed to detect airport security threats hidden under clothing — without exposing passengers’ private body parts to scrutiny. The device, scheduled to go into production in the first quarter of 2011, is based on millimeter wave technology spun out of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Four decades ago, when few were interested in millimeter waves, the university staked out a leadership position in research and industry at the high end of the radiation spectrum.
Unlike existing body scanners, which work something like a hospital CT scan, bouncing millimeter-wave or x-ray radiation off the body to detect foreign objects, Millivision’s technology uses passive sensors. Part of the body’s heat falls into the millimeter wave spectrum. Millivision’s sensors pick up those waves and recognize when they’ve been changed or obstructed by a foreign object.
Much of Millivision’s effort has gone into detecting threats made of metal, which can be hardest to catch because they conduct heat, CEO Paul Nicholas said. “The trick is to detect things that are at body temperature,” he said. In a video demonstration, Nicholas showed how Millivision’s sensor flagged hidden objects, like a bag of liquid explosive or a ceramic knife, as patches of red on his clothes.
Other companies in Western Massachusetts, all with varying degrees of connections to UMass, make millimeter wave devices for communications, industrial sensors and radar — including the built-in blind-spot detection on some late-model cars. “They’re simply microwaves at higher frequency,” said Kent Whitney, president of Northampton’s Millitech Inc., one of the longest-established firms in the cluster.
Higher-frequency waves can absorb and carry more data, Whitney said. In communications, that means greater bandwidth; in radar, higher resolution. Airfield radar technology called Tarsier, developed by Millitech after runway debris contributed to the crash of a Concorde jet in 2000, provides more detail than traditional microwave radar systems, Whitney said. “You can actually differentiate the direction different blades of grass are cut on a runway 2 kilometers away,” he said. “You can detect the plastic cap of a ballpoint pen. It’s as though you’re looking at a high-resolution photograph.”
Millitech’s founders, who started the company in the 1980s, were astronomers at UMass — colleagues of Professor Emeritus Sigfrid Yngvesson. Now 74, Yngvesson was one of two faculty members working on microwaves, and the only one working on millimeter waves at UMass, when the university hired him in 1970, he said.
As interest in microwave technology grew, millimeter waves piggybacked on that growth, Yngvesson said. “MIT wasn’t interested in microwaves, but we were,” he said. “We were willing to expand.”
Another company, Prosensing Inc. of Amherst, developed a one-of-a-kind radar system for Logan Airport, used to alert the control tower when tall vessels like cruise ships are present in the harbor. It sits out at the end of one Logan runway in a red-and-white shed, said Prosensing President Jim Meade.
Airport radar may be the highest-profile use Massachusetts’ millimeter-wave cluster has seen so far. The industry doesn’t advertise itself, Meade said. “We have a limited market, and we feel like we know all of our customers.”
That may change if Millivision succeeds. So far, that hasn’t been easy. The company, which spun off from Millitech in 1998, declared bankruptcy in 2004, and was bought up by Juno Investments LLC, a New York private equity firm that is now Millivision’s single backer.
The problem, Nicholas said, is Millivision was distracted by efforts in too many industries. In addition to the airport screening application, the company was trying to develop products for military radar and security uses. “Even focusing on one thing is too much,” Nicholas said.
Now, with all its nine original engineers still intact at the company, Millivision hopes to reach profitability with its first product, Nicholas said. It’s in a race against at least one other company — a U.K. firm called ThruVision Systems Ltd. — to bring to market a passive security scanner.
If it wins, Millivision will seek new capital infusions to develop sensors for use outside the security screening setting, detecting threats from 12 feet to 20 feet away, along a busy walkway, for example.
That technology is demonstrable now, Nicholas said — but he’s not trying to get ahead of himself. “Those systems I need more funding for, or we’ll end up in the same situation again.”
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