 I'm Jay Fidel and this is Think Tech Tech Talks. We're talking about tech. We're talking about Nalu Scientific. We're talking about how it develops high-performance electronics equipment right here in Hawaii, not in Waimanalo, but in Nalo. It's quite different, yeah? And Isar Mustafanajad is here with us. He's a physicist, a PhD, and he's fast. You know what I mean? Watch out. He's fast. So welcome to the show. Isar, so nice to see you. Hi, Jay. Thanks for having me. So let's get something off our chest, okay? You had something you wanted to say consistent with the press lately. It's about some grants you've got. Tell us and refer to your slides so we can sort of get past that and drill down. Are you ready? Go. Sure. Well, thanks for having me. This is a really exciting time for us. We have been working on this project for the past few years. At Nalu Scientific, we are designing advanced microchips that help scientists measure time or time, essentially, down to a picosecond, which is a trillionth of a second resolution. So talking about fast, these electronics have to operate really fast, essentially. And if Eric wants to bring up the picture of the microchip that we have developed, the artwork chip, essentially, that's one of the grants that we've recently gotten. And again, everything that happens in the world is analog, as you would imagine when you talk, what you see, and what you hear. Everything is analog. But computers don't speak analog. They speak digital in order for you to compute or calculate or do any sort of characterization of what's going on in the world. You need to convert this information from analog to digital. And that's what we do. We design microchips that operate very fast and they can convert signals that happen in the analog world, which is the real world, into the digital world, and such that the scientists or engineers can do their processing down those. Yeah, let's take a look at some slides. We have a number of slides, one that sort of demonstrate what your company or your laboratory looks like. There's one. Can you describe that? Yeah, sure. So this is about us a little bit. Again, fast growing startup. So thanks for the plug there, Jay. We are experts in integrated circuit design. So integrated circuits, microchips, microelectronics, essentially are the same word for this little square, tiny square that you see in one of the pictures that's sitting on the top left, for example. And these integrated circuits have been around since the 60s, essentially. That's what has brought us here revolutionized our world the way that we know it. We are working on a customized version of this that allows scientists to measure the specific qualities of time very fast. And you had some shots of your laboratory and your equipment you use and the chips you develop. Let me take a look at those two to get an idea. Yeah, sure. Let's go to maybe slide number nine. We can probably jump a few slides there. And this is on the right, we have the picture of the microchip attached to a printed circuit board. Essentially, if you open your computer or your phone, you see a bunch of these things, but these are specialized for this application. In the middle, you see one of our staff members soldering things together, especially the microchip that's fabricated. We don't fabricate the microchip, we do design. So you can categorize us as a fabulous semiconductor company, essentially, that doesn't have its own fab. And it doesn't make sense these days to fabricate these microchips. So we design these, send the design files, aka CAD files to the facility they fabricated, they send it back to us. And then now we have to test it and make sure it is what we designed, essentially. So we do all that type of assembly work in-house. In-house in Manoa? In-house at UH? Right, yeah. Everybody's here at the Manoa Innovation Center. So we have a small office there. It's a quite flexible area slash office building. It's essentially an incubation space for new tech companies that can access that are reasonable discounted rates. I mean, last thing you want to do as a cash-burning startup tech company is pay a lot for rent. So that's the ability that we have there. There's good internet. And you can go to our website and figure out how to become a tenant there too. Yeah. I can go to the newspaper and try to figure out how much grant money you've had in the past few years. And I get like $5 million. But the question is, you had to burn through that pretty quickly in order to come up with some of these chips and devices and electronics. How does that work? Absolutely. So a lot of these developments are very labor-intensive because we're doing design work. And by design, I mean engineers with tens of years of experience in this art. And I call it art because it's beyond technology to some extent. You know, you have to kind of see a little bit through the computer screen. And it's not just moving boxes around and coming up with the design. You have to really know what you're doing essentially. And we're really lucky to have staff members that have kind of leap to that other world essentially. And they can bring that art. And people say electronics is an art. And there are books called Art of Electronics, for example, from back in the sixties or seventies. But it is, you know, every day that we're doing this job, it's a really labor-intensive process to design these microchips. So that's, if you're asking where the money is going, I can tell you that's where it's going. And then you have to prototype it, fabricate it, design it, come back and test it and all that. So yeah. Yeah. And testing is really important. I want to digress for a moment. I was watching Amazon last night. And I can't remember the name of the movie. It was an odd name about a bunch of guys back in the early eighties who decided they were going to reverse engineer the BIOS in the IBM PC. And you had a really hands-on look at how they did that, checking out all the numbers on all the ports on the BIOS chip. It was amazing. Never seen a popular movie like that. It was very interesting. And it's a window in case anybody's interested in the kind of thing you're talking about. We have to be infinitely patient, have to go one step at a time. You have to test it all, write it down, test it again, and so forth. And the creativity must give you a huge sense of satisfaction. Absolutely. There's a lot of creativity involved, but as you mentioned, it's very methodical to what you mentioned, to be in the lab, take the data, test it, measure it, compare it with your theory, what you were designing for. And so it's very, you need to be very patient and you need to be very methodical. And I can say that we have staff members that are to that quality. Yeah, and you want to design, say, a chip or any kind of electronic, you know, small device. It's not just one aha. It's not just one, you know, Eureka. It's a series of Eurekas and you're learning, testing, creating, and going on to the next one. And then you're going through it all again to make it better and in your case, faster. I'm so impressed with that that it's happening here. Anybody else doing it here? Are you the only company in Hawaii that's doing it? Gosh, I've heard of other companies that are doing, you know, small chip design projects. And what you mentioned is absolutely right. You have this little box, tiny, you know, one cinema, if Eric wants to go to slide number two, I can show you a little bit there. There are millions, technically, literally millions of transistors on that little chip on the black box on the left under the hood. And if, you know, even if I showed you what's inside it, you won't be able to really see what's going on there because I don't have pixels to describe it. But, you know, and if one of those fails, you get a brick. It's pretty simple, right? So the margin is really slim. What's a brick? You know, you can use it as a keychain, essentially, taking it to the processing that you want to do basically. Yeah, put it in the bottom of the fish tank, yeah. Yeah, yeah, something like that. I don't know if you want to put it in a fish tank because, you know, it might, it might not be good for the fish. You know what, whatever you're operating. So, you know, I'm getting the idea that this is the, these chips that you're inventing have, have, have extraordinary uses, uses that are, that are awaiting you. And I guess my first question is, are these chips deployed already or are they at a point where they're not yet deployed but are of interest to other electronics manufacturers like computer manufacturers and sensor manufacturers or, or devices that use sensors, I should say. And they're only waiting for you to say, okay, we have it on the market. Is that what they're waiting for? Yeah, I don't think these will be going into a computer or a cell phone. These are a little bit more specialized than that. And so we are, right now the current version of these microchips are actually on their beta testing at facilities in the mainland US and also Japan and some in Europe actually. And, and these are in use by scientists and research facilities that, that will need them. In general, our plan is, you know, to, to really build on these chips and go to a value add situation. Let's say, okay, this is a microchip. We have this underlying technology. Now it's patented with our name on it. So, you know, we made this great. But we really need to kind of bring it to the application world. In the first application world is experiments in the physics world, like the, you know, similar to the large Hadron Collider experiment in Switzerland. And it's a very niche application of our microchip. And that's what we've been getting funding and to promise to them that, you know, this will be coming their way. And there is a next generation experiment that's going to be happening in the United States. It's called the electron ion collider in the at the Brookhaven National Lab in Long Island, essentially. So we're, we're working with the end users, potential end users there. I mean, we're talking, you know, five to 10 years down the road that they're building this essentially, but we're working our way to make sure that we, our tech is a match what their needs essentially. And so all the beta testing is going forward with that. Well, you know, what I don't understand is exactly how you, how you conceive of a given device, a given technology, a given discovery. Because you have to know what they want at Brookhaven. What do you do? You call them up one day and say, Hi, Brookhaven, my name is Isar. I'd like to build something that you need. What do you need? How do you, how do you structure what you're doing to meet whatever they want? Right. So my background is electrical engineering. I'm fascinated by how these microelectronics things work essentially. But the way that I got familiar with this world of the customer and their needs was if you go to slide number three, Eric, for example, you see an experiment that I was involved with. I was in Japan. So I was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Hawaii. And that's where they were, that my task was to go to Japan a lot and work on this experiment as an expert, essentially. And I learned a lot. You know, I can't claim that I was really an expert. I was bringing something to the table. But then I had to learn a lot. And if you go to slide number four, Eric, there you see, this is how this facility looked like in 2015. And it's a 900 member collaborator, 26 countries involved. It's a very big, and when I say 900, I'm talking 900 PhDs in physics and engineering. So I was working with them day in, day out and learning from them and learning what their pain points were, where that was 2014, 15, 16. And then that kind of started me to scratch my head and realize that there could be a market for this technology, essentially, and hence find resources and figure out a way to start a company, essentially, to be able to cater to this world. So you have to follow the action. You have to follow the action globally. You have to know who's doing what, where, and how. That means you've got to go to conferences or at least correspond with scientists and developers all over the world. Are you still doing that even in the time of COVID? Absolutely. So from 2016 to 2019, essentially, we had this campaign of really trying to publish the work that we've been doing. I mean, patent as much as possible and then publish results as much as possible. So we get some protection, but at the same time, we get the word out there. We can't be making this in our cave. We have to be interacting with the end user. So that's what we did. We went to lots of conferences and we made lots of new contacts and connections. And there was excitement. And these were people that wrote us letters of support. When we were talking to the funding agencies, the funding agency, in this case, United States Department of Energy, would tell us to go and work with the end users and listen to their pain points. So that's what we did through conferences, technical meetings and all that. And now the majority of end users kind of know our name. So that's really a good thing. The times of COVID, yeah, we're not exactly getting on the plane every other week to go places, but everybody is doing the same thing, which is nobody's getting on the plane. You can talk with Zoom. Absolutely. That's what I'm saying. So everybody is Zooming. And I'm actually getting more meetings in a day than I used to in 8 a.m. to, in fact, actually 6 a.m. because I got to start with East Coast time to like 5 p.m. I barely have time to scratch my head. So it's back to back. It's just jam-packed. You know how many people you can talk to in Zoom calls these days. So it's a bit of a blessing in the disguise, despite all the challenges that it has brought us. Yeah, there's two sides to it because you could work harder this way. So you spoke about the Department of Energy, and I saw that in the newspaper. And I wonder what you've described doesn't immediately call energy into mind. What's the connection between what you're doing in the Department of Energy? Unless they just like to be very generous and charitable to you, why do they care? Right. That's a very good question. That was my question in 2015 also. So the Department of Energy has this thing called the Office of Science, which is a $7 billion a year entity essentially. And they cover very basic scientific discovery in the United States in the physics world. And their budget is the same size as the budget of NSF essentially, National Science Foundation, which is responsible for covering a variety of research. So DOE now has the unique opportunity to be really focused in the type of discovery they can fund. And in this case, really understanding the matter and energy and matter down to subatomic level is what they can do. And so that's what they have been able to do. They fund these discovery experiments, and they will need electronics for those. And we walked up to them and knowing that they're the funding agency, we started talking to them and said, hey, this is what we can do. How can we get it funded? And then they have programs to help us find our way in terms of how to get this funding in place. So hopefully that answered your question. Yeah, well, it sounds like you have to be creative and go where the scientific interest and where the funding of course is. The other thing I wanted to ask you is talk about the meetings with the scientists, with engineers, with physicists, of course. And it actually reminds me of a movie, another movie, sorry, one more movie, called The Queen's Gambit, which is, I think, also on Amazon. It's about a young woman who's a prodigy in chess, at night when she lies in her bed and she thinks about chess. She sees the chess pieces on the ceiling over her. Her mind is organized to visually, graphically see the board wherever she goes, whatever she's doing. And I wonder how it works for you as a developer of this kind of electronics. Do you see the pieces on the ceiling? Do you walk around in a kind of matrix, a graphical matrix of how you make a chip? And do you see it from the eyes of a physicist, which I really would like to know how physics relates to what you're doing, the eyes of an engineer, maybe an electrical engineer. How do you see it and what does it look like and how much of the time do you spend imagining what you're doing? Right. Gosh, well, thanks for comparing me about these, you know, really amazing stories and movie stars and it's really flattering. But to answer your question, I think there's a multiple aspects to it. I mean, the tech is very important. I do think about the technology a lot, the bits and pieces that go in it. But at the same time, my focus has shifted a little bit into making sure that we get the business side correct also. So I'm not a businessman by trade. I'm an engineer that has been, now, is getting training on the job, essentially, to be able to run the business and grow the business, essentially. So when we started, my mind was a lot, you know, involved with the technology aspect of how do we design this little transistor so that it would connect with this other transistor, the chess pieces, essentially, and get them to talk to each other in a way that they will create the desired results. And, you know, in an engineer's mind, that's, you know, number one, you keep thinking about it a lot. Sometimes you dream about it. I work with a lot of people that are in that caliber. And so I'm very lucky to have, you know, system architects and really good engineers at the company that are doing that on a daily basis. So that I can say that they are taking care of that aspect of it now. I've kind of, you know, kind of handed that aspect to them. But then I, what I do is walk around and think, okay, where else can we use this little microchip now? How can we get this next customer up and making phone calls, be in touch, strategizing a little bit? Who can be the distributor for our technology potentially? We're a small company on an island. How do we get the word out to the world, you know? So we need to work with collaborators, essentially. So that's the aspect that is taking sleep away from me, if that's your question. You play chess, Isar? When I was little, I did, but it's been a long time. You're way beyond that now, okay. So talk about business, okay? It's not like you're getting an email from, I don't know, some place in Europe and they say, Isar, can you send us 25 units or 100 units of your newest device? It's not like that, right? But you say business, the business right now, correct me if I'm wrong, is really getting grants to go to the next step, rather than doing manufacturing to satisfy an existing market that knows what it wants from you. But tell me how far along the path you are on that and where the path goes. Right. Yeah, I mean, we're kind of making a transition now. We are getting these phone calls and scientists or engineers that want to try our device, essentially, which is really exciting and heartwarming. And now we have to fulfill orders. So we're like, okay, how do we do that, right? So we're doing that transition right now. But at the same time, we understand very well that we have an R&D machine that's running fast and is guzzling gas, essentially. So we want to make sure that the R&D team is busy doing what they're really good at and they're funded to do that too. So that's kind of my job nowadays to make sure that as the number of manpower FTEs actually increase the company that we have really amazing problems for them to solve. Fast. We're back to fast. So what is the secret about fast? I mean, if you had to describe to me how you make electronics sensors, these chips, really fast, faster than anything that we've seen and heard of since ever before, what's the secret to it? How do you make it work really, really fast? Right. So there's, maybe there are two aspects to it. There's microelectronics that operate fast. And then there's a team that is capable to make these in a reasonable timeline fast. I don't know which one exactly referring to what I can cover both essentially. Are you talking about material science? Are you talking about nanotechnology? No, we're still actually, we're using really kind of the day-to-day use CMOS process, the semiconductor, you know, kind of a vanilla CMOS process essentially. We're not, we're not doing anything in the material science yet. But there is a lot of unknowns that, and there's a lot of, you know, design tricks left still to make the semiconductors go fast. So that's what we're doing. And the way that we do this is we use older semiconductor technology and we design and really specifically for those older technology, because they're a lot cheaper to fabricate prototype. If you make a mistake, you can prototype again. Right. And the design tools are a lot cheaper too. The design tools to use the older technology is a lot cheaper too. So, but we have to spend a little bit on the manpower to really, you know, do that, you know, make sure that the design actually operates in the way that we want to. And when you're talking about semiconductor industry or any sort of hardware design, fast is the, is the last thing you want to think about because it's just such a time consuming process. It's not exactly software that you can code. And I don't say software development easy or anything like that. But if you make a mistake, you can go back and fix things. Whereas, you know, for designing a microchip, you spend, you know, maybe six months designing it. And then you have to wait for three months for it to be fabricated. And if you're lucky, the fab house is fast enough for you. You're talking about a year before you can have something in your hand that you can just turn on and what we call a smoke test. Turn it on. Okay, great. It didn't catch fire. Number one. Now let's see if actually doing what you wanted it to do. So it takes a long time. They have the smoke test in that first movie I mentioned at half the time that we go up and smoke. Exactly. Yeah, I've witnessed a few. So so let's talk about, you know, you mentioned a couple of times patents. Okay. And I assume that the officer technology in UH is helping you get patents. And you've gotten a few patents around this kind of technology. Is it so? What are the, what are the terms, what kind of service do they provide to you in that regard? Right. So I just want to clarify one thing real quick here that we are, you know, we're a separate entity from UH. We're actually a LLC. And when it comes to relationship with UH, we are, what happens is we subcontract some of the work to the University of Hawaii. Got it. So they own their part and they do whatever they want with it. But the part that is ours is essentially is given to us based on the terms of the grants given to us essentially. So we are allowed to patent those and, you know, create protection for ourselves. So the patent process, you know, I've been in and out of it here and there throughout my previous companies that I worked on. And so you basically, you have to describe what you're doing. And you want to make sure nobody else has done it before. So you do a little bit, you know, what is it called, you do your due diligence to some extent, right? And then you write in a paper what you've been doing and, you know, add pictures and things like that. And then that's what we did. And then we worked with a patent attorney, you know, independent of any institute or anything like that. So then we managed to file for patents and actually get awarded those. Yeah. Well, it brings another point of connection into mind. And that is that you have to follow the prior art. Just as you write the papers, you have to read the papers all over the world to see what the prior art is. So you can distinguish your invention from all that. Otherwise, it's not going to be easily patentable. Well, all that being so, that's pretty, that's pretty exciting for that to happen in Hawaii, it really is. Do you see the, you know, the possibility of an industry here? You see the I mean, not necessarily doing exactly what you do, but doing the kinds of things you're doing with the kinds of talent that you're bringing in on your staff. Do you see that as possible either in Minoa Innovation Center or elsewhere in these islands? I think the answer is yes. The question is, if there's well power, if there is, you know, enough outreach and knowledge and kind of, yes, we can behind that, right? I think there are many, many, many unsolved problems in the world. And I think the answer to that is, how do we solve these problems? And so I think it's a combination of subject matter expertise, workforce, think about the ways to design around the problems or design solutions for the problems, start with a little island situation, you know, if we can fix problems that are relevant to the island, then maybe we can expand it to the continent or the world, right? So this, you know, this is one way to look at it. So what happens if somebody from Silicon Valley calls you up one day and says, look, you know, we have a lot of venture capital we want to give you. We like you a lot. We've been following and watching you. And we'd like to, you know, support you and invest in you. We can find your space. We can find you additional staff. We can help you in every way. Why don't you come down here? Why don't you relocate your LLC to, you know, California, what have you, and we'll make you happier than you've ever been? What happens then? These are. Right, right. So there's two things here. One is that, you know, the venture capital is going after, you know, cases that they can actually get maybe a billion dollars in return, right? And then what we're working on is not exactly a billion dollar market, right? It's a small niche problem, but it's a respectable size problem. It's enough for a small business to work on and keep people employed and kind of grow and expand on in a place like Hawaii. So we're quite happy with that, to be honest with you. And if there is an aspect of our technology that Silicon Valley really wants to get their hands on, you know, this day and age, a lot of things are happening remotely. I mean, nobody's working at Google office right now, right? So and guess where the Google employees are? My friends work there and they're all around the world now. So why would you want to even be there? Right? So I think the COVID has taught us a lot of things. And that's one of them. I know a lot of tech people that have come to Hawaii and, you know, looking for a place to live or at least short term, test it out essentially. And so we are from Hawaii. So we don't really want to go anywhere at this point. So I think we can probably learn a few things, take a few pages from this COVID experience and see what can be done. Okay, with that lesson and with, you know, the vision that it's a hard vision, but with the vision that COVID has given us, has required us to look at over the horizon. Where do you see your company going in the next few years in terms of projects and electronics, in terms of market, in terms of, you know, global connections with other organizations that might be either collaborators or users of your technology? Where do you see it going? Gosh, I wish I had a crystal ball to answer that. But, you know, we will continue to do what we're good at and what we've been getting better at. I think that's the first answer. And I think there's an understanding that science is making discoveries in the world. Even this COVID situation, somebody made a real fancy microscope to take pictures of the virus and it's everywhere now, right? You can see it everywhere. And there are facilities in the United States and in the world to really, really, you know, fancy, with fancy electronics and imaging capabilities to really take pictures of these down to microscopic and in our case, atomic level experiments that happen. So I feel that that will just be more demand for potentially electronics, type of electronics that we make, because those machines are essentially imagined sides of the six-story tall building filled with electronics, right? And I don't say knowledge will build all the electronics that go into that, but if we take a, you know, 5% bite of that, that's going to be enough for us for a long time. So I think the answer, short form answer is, you know, countries and hopefully our country also will still be on path to fund science and technology for creating discoveries that we might not know what the, you know, next year uses, but we will know 10 years from now, it will answer a lot of questions. When radio waves were discovered, they didn't, they didn't call them radio waves. They didn't know what to call them. And nobody knew that, you know, what it could be used for until, you know, first telegraph was transmitted, you know, wirelessly. So I don't want to compare it to that, but, you know, there are lots, lots of things that happen that we just don't, don't find a way today to use it, but we will. Yeah. And all I can say is if we can see the virus, we can figure it out maybe better. We can figure a solution to this virus and other viruses, and that will be a, that will be a great contribution to humanity for sure. Well, thank you. He's our, he's our most, most of Van Zed. Thank you very much for coming around and spending the time with us. Really appreciate these discussions. Aloha. My real pleasure. Thanks for having me.