1. You started Holzworth Instrumentation in your garage in 2004 after a bit of time in the test and measurement industry. You were there until the company was acquired in 2020 and then you founded Saetta Labs in 2023. Can you tell us a bit about your background and your entrepreneurial journey?
You might say someone who starts and grows a company is compelled to do it. I wanted to start/own my own company as far back as my undergrad. There is a certain sink-or-swim mentality surrounding the process that attracts me. I also like to wear a lot of hats and work with like-minded people. In a small company, especially starting, it’s a unique, fast-moving, team-oriented attitude and it’s very inspiring.
The Holzworth journey was one of personal and collective growth. I was quite young when I founded it and was uneducated in the business world; it was quite a rapid education. I had two excellent partners, Joe and Leyla and we were all in. The lack of business education turned out to be an advantage at the time. We were trying to launch our first product in 2007 and 2008 when funding was non-existent, so we bootstrapped. This led to efficiencies in design and manufacturing that continue to this day. The culture of the company grew organically, and no single person was responsible for it; we all contributed. I can’t sugarcoat the difficulty of starting and growing a company for everyone involved, but for those who enjoy that environment, it’s extremely rewarding. It was a journey of many, not one.
Saetta Labs is a new company that is continuing the journey, but it is substantially easier the second time around. The idea is to learn from previous experience while maintaining flexibility for new challenges. I started Saetta Labs because I enjoy working with people, advanced technology and sharing the experience.
2. What was the driver for you to start Saetta Labs? What are the biggest challenges and opportunities when you start a company?
After selling Holzworth, I once again had time to read and learn about new technological possibilities. I’m not interested in business for the sake of business; I want to be involved with new technology and push what’s possible. I believe if you do quality work that adds value, the business naturally follows. The driver to start Saetta Labs was to advance oscillator technology and work with motivated and inspired people.
Each type of company has its unique challenges. In the case of Saetta Labs, we had to build the knowledge base of the sapphire technology and the environment to create it. It took an entire lab of equipment, not just a laptop and software license. We had to extend our capabilities in multiple disciplines to solve the engineering challenges. We brought in multiple types of machining, the ability to work with sapphire, vacuum equipment and temperature chambers, as well as all the typical microwave test equipment. We now have a whole ecosystem to prototype and manufacture oscillators on-site in a vertically integrated company.
3. Holzworth Instrumentation became a very successful company and you ultimately sold it to Wireless Telecom Group, now part of Maury Microwave. What differentiates your work at Saetta Labs from the work you were doing at Holzworth?
Our primary focus at Holzworth was creating low phase noise synthesizers and analyzers by developing better architectures with existing technology. However, the phase noise was limited by the available frequency references (quartz OCXO). To build a better synthesizer (or radar), you need a better reference. Saetta Labs was formed to develop sapphire oscillator references from the ground up to extend the state of the art. Sapphire oscillators do not lend themselves to on-chip solutions or stuffing PCBs; they are a true 3-dimensional structure designed using multiple engineering disciplines.
4. Can you describe some “metrics” (number of employees, square footage of facilities, locations, number of products, etc.) that would give our readers a better sense of Saetta Labs?
We are a small, focused company. We have a single facility in Boulder, Colorado and are in our first year of delivering product. This is a growth year for us, but we will still be at less than 10 people by year's end. This can be both a pro and con for our customers. On the positive side, we can respond quickly to demanding specifications, but we understand working with a small company also has inherent risks to larger programs. We are actively evaluating manufacturing partnerships for larger volumes to help mitigate this risk for our customers as well as organic growth.
5. Your oscillators are sapphire-loaded. What can you tell our readers about the advantages of sapphire and the advantages of the “whispering-gallery” mode that you use in your oscillators?
Resonator Q-factor is the single biggest determinant of oscillator phase noise. Quartz and SAW oscillators have dominated the low phase noise market because of their high Q, but they operate relatively low in frequency and are acoustic-electric. The phase noise degrades as it’s multiplied as well as being susceptible to vibration.
Our oscillators use sapphire as the resonator element with a whispering-gallery mode. The whispering-gallery mode is a pure microwave resonance and operates fundamentally at X-Band (4 to 20 GHz). The difference between the whispering-gallery and the TM and TE modes used in most DROs is it uses the dielectric boundary condition between sapphire and air (or vacuum) to contain the resonance. TM and TE modes use the metal walls of the cavity as the boundary condition. The metal walls are losses, degrading Q-factor. Our sapphire-based resonators have Q factors in excess of 200,000 at 8 GHz. Sapphire has an extremely high-power handling with no 1/f degradation, again differentiating it from quartz resonators.
6. What are the core competencies and technologies that differentiate you from your competitors?
The current trend in our field is to only move forward with a design that can be put on a chip or stuffed on a board. We threw that premise out immediately. First, we developed closed-form expressions for the whispering-gallery modes and can create any microwave oscillator frequency. The design and manufacturing of the sapphire oscillator is vertically integrated and the sapphire ground on-site to the exact frequency. Sapphire oscillators are inherently three-dimensional, and we developed the know-how and manufacturing capability to produce them completely in-house.
7. What is your market focus and how do you see that changing in the next five years?
There are two markets the sapphire oscillator feeds into quite easily: instrumentation and radar. Instrumentation is obvious, where performance dominates. The other is radar, especially ground-based targeting radar for incoming targets. Current radars are limited by quartz technology from about 10 kHz to 200 kHz offsets. Sapphire excels in this range, giving the designers new degrees of freedom and improving existing radars with a “drop-in.”
In the next five years, the sapphire oscillator can improve any system utilizing new direct RF DACs and ADCs that sample in the X-Band and above, regardless of the application. The latest and in-development DACs and ADCs have lower phase noise than quartz references and only sapphire can utilize their full potential.
8. Where is your development focus? What applications, products and markets have you excited for the future?
We are going to stay solely focused on high-frequency and ultra-low phase noise sapphire oscillators and related components. We will release components that help our customers integrate sapphire references, including regenerative frequency dividers and distribution amplifiers. There are so many applications that could benefit from sapphire technology that we will just have to wait and see.
9. What is your vision for Saetta Labs in the future? What will be your biggest challenge to make that vision a reality?
Saetta Labs was founded on technology by engineers for engineers. The biggest challenge is education and customer support to bring this level of ultra-low phase noise to the system level. Measuring devices at this noise level is very challenging, as is maintaining it throughout the signal chain. We must be adaptable and supportive to our customer's needs.
10. What else would you like our readers to know about Saetta Labs?
Looking at things a bit more philosophically, we believe each person at a company is much more than a resource on a spreadsheet. Advanced technology is successful by the contributions of individuals working together. We are excited to continue working with existing and new customers and curious about future applications we haven’t thought of.