During the Winter Olympics, the Canadian military used a new hand-held scanner to check baggage for dirty bombs.
The radiation sensors used in those hand-held devices – now in use in Afghanistan – were made on Vancouver Island by Redlen Technologies, which has spent the last 10 years solving a problem that has baffled scientists for decades.
The challenge is how to make high-quality cadium zinc telluride (CZT) semiconductor material in large volumes, something that has been prohibitively expensive.
“The problem has been that no one could produce it economically,” says Redlen CEO Glenn Bindley.
“The ability to produce it in large quantities and high quality has been the issue. We’ve achieved a real breakthrough in the cost and quality.”
Philip Cohen – head of nuclear medicine at Lion’s Gate Hospital – said the Redlen semiconductor has the potential to do for diagnostics what the transistor did for electronics – replace vacuum-tube technology with solid-state electronics.
“It basically could change the whole field of radiology,” Cohen told Business in Vancouver.
Most semiconductors are made from silicon – a crystal – and are used primarily in transistors, solar cells and diodes. Semiconductors made from CZT crystals are like radiation gates and have different applications.
They can be used in applications requiring various forms of radiation – X-rays, gamma rays, etc. – to be either detected or converted to electricity.
Radiation detection is used in a variety of medical imaging technology,like CT and PET scans, as well as baggage and dirty-bomb scanners. (A dirty bomb is one in which explosives are used to spread radioactive material causing contamination.)
In 2001, after the dot-com crash temporarily knocked the wind out of the sails of companies like PMC Sierra, which he co-founded, Bindley said he decided he needed a new project to motivate him and joined Redlen.
At the time, Bindley said Redlen was “literally two guys in a garage.”
In 2007, Rob Crestani, a PMC Sierra co-founder, signed on as Redlen’s director of systems engineering.
With funding from a number of angel investors – including Ken Spencer, founder of Creo, who sits on Redlen’s board of directors – the company has spent the last 10 years refining a process that allows the company to mass-produce the CZT crystal.
It has been a painstaking process, but by 2009, all the major scientific wrinkles had been ironed out and the company began producing CZT for a variety of commercial applications.
One year ago, the company’s 50 employees moved into a new purpose-built manufacturing plant in Saanichton, and the company plans to add another 30 staff by year end.
Redlen’s semiconductors are already being used by Spectrum Dynamics, an Israeli company that makes a cardiac imaging system that provides high-resolution imaging but with low doses of radiation.
They are also used in a probe that detects cancer cells in breast cancer patients and in hand-held dirty-bomb scanners made by Thermo Fisher.
Redlen is also producing large volumes of raw material for thin-film solar panels.
But the company views the biggestmarket to be in medical diagnostics, such as x-ray machines and CAT and PET scans.
Arnold Burger, a physics professor at Fisk University in Tennessee, said a study published by Redlen scientists in 2006 demonstrated the company had made “significant” strides.
“Redlen has indeed made a significant contribution to the CZT community of researchers,” Burger said. “The CZT research is still much needed because not all the problems were solved and that reflects in the fact that CZT crystals are not yet a commodity, as is the case with silicon or gallium arsenide crystals.”
Bindley said some of the outstanding issues in the process were resolved in 2008-09. He said the company is now in a high-growth stage. The company made $4.2 million in revenue last year, and expects to double that this year and next.
“We are not yet profitable,” Bindley said. “We are probably a few quarters away.”
Bindley said the company will likely go public with an IPO in about two years.