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Das Interview ist insofern hoch interessant, da Olsson auch auf die großen Schwierigkeiten bei der Entwicklung und dem Aufbau des Unternehmens in den Anfangsjahren eingeht: (2) The Making of Obducat | | Lennart Olsson, one of the founders of Obducat |
By MAGNUS LUND
The much hyped Swedish, Malmoe based company Obducat was once just an idea dreamt by the serial entrepreneur Lennart Olsson. NanoNordic.com wanted to know how it all started, so we went straight to the source and interviewed Lennart. Macro-micro-nano
Once upon a time in the late 1970’s Lennart was running a HI-FI business in Malmoe and started to think about music CD’s and what the next step of product development might be. Thinking about the evolving value chain he started to identify needs and products. He became interested in CD-ROM’s and began to look at what the steps of production might be. In 1985 the interest resulted in a company, the CD manufacturer CD-Plant, today a part of SDC-Group.
– I started to get interested in small things, this was natural as the need for testing and measuring at a very small scale was essential in the work at CD-Plant, says Lennart.
The width of a track on a CD can’t deviate more then 30 nanometres. This called for the development of testing equipment and this resulted in the product offering of the company Audiodevelopment, today Audiodev. Development
Obducat was founded in 1989 by Lennart Olsson and Henri Bergstrand strictly for the purpose of developing a simplified technology to manufacture matrices for the production of CD-discs. Until 1996 all actual development was carried out in Lennart’s company: Ingenjor Lennart Olsson AB. The resulting technologies were later transferred to Obducat. The people involved in the projects obviously took a liking to working with advanced etching technology. Today Obducat offers Electron beam lithography (the EBR-200), Micro and Nano Lithography, Scanning Electron Microscopes and stamper production. O-B-Ducat?
The name meaning of the name Obducat has always eluded NanoNordic.com. Lennart solved the puzzle for us and offers the following explanation:
–O is for Olsson and B for Bergstrand, the founders. “Ducat” can be interpreted either as “valuable coin” or as the full word in Latin meaning “covered”, Lennart says. Q: Did Obducat’s products have an evolution by themselves or was there a strict plan from early on?
– The EBR was very much our ambition from the start. But there were many components missing to make it happen. We sat down and made a grid what building blocks and technologies we needed to build the EBR. Some building blocks we expected to be developed by others. We decided to focus on the blocks we didn’t expect anyone else to take care of. It was an interdisciplinary mapping project, resulting in a research plan. We then started working, completing the greater project, Lennart says. Q: Setting up a grid sounds easier said then done, how did everyday operations work?
– This was at a time when it was rather tricky to position something on the micrometer scale, today we’re doing it on the nanometer scale, we had to experiment a lot, Lennart says and continues:
– Until 1996, 2-3 employees were working with the project, we had no revenue whatsoever. I was basically paying all expenses out of my own pocket and moon-lighting by arranging conferences and doing consultancy gigs. It was impossible to get venture capital back then, you’d get laughs rather then money, if you tried. But we were pushing hard to develop the etching technology. Among other projects in the early-mid 1990-ies, one of my employees, Babak Heidari and I were trying to find solutions to do chemical wet etchings at a nanoscale. I was working on the models and Babak was running the lab. One day Babak told me: “This can’t be done, it simply doesn’t work”, so I said “let’s just forget about it for a couple of weeks, clear our minds, and return to the problem later. There is something truly wrong here”. An early morning, a few days later Babak calls me and says:”We’ve misinterpreted the images from the scanning electron beam microscope, RESULTS ARE FANTASTIC!” It’s tricky to know what’s up and down in the grey microscopy pictures. What you think is a dot may in fact be a hole. So it turned out that we had been doing these wonderful wet etchings less then 100 nanometres wide. What we thought was residue, was in fact perfect etchings, Lennart says. Q: Wow! And what happened next?
– We presented the results to Professor Lars Montelius who had told us this couldn’t be done, but he was nevertheless very eager to take a look in the microscope and when he did, he said: “WOW!” That felt like a true victory, we knew we were on to something then. We received a lot of attention from the University of Lund as no one else had accomplished the same at the time, Lennart says and continues:
–But of course we needed to do a lot more work. I usually say that it’s vital to find processes that aren’t disturbed by the environment, nor disturbs the environment in return. You need stability in industrial processes. If in a lab, a process gives you one unexpected good result once every thousandth time in a research lab, it’s interesting. In an industrial process it’s unacceptable! In industry there may only be one error in a thousand good ones. We started to work on how to turn it into an industrial process. Q: Is a nanotech a revolution?
– Nanotech could turn out to be a tremendous threat to the western world, a source of revenue by all means, but often you don’t need a lot of infrastructure to get going. The threshold to production can be very low. Nanotech can be what I’d like to call “the desk-top factory”. No chimneys, no giant industrial complexes, no railroad. You can, in principle, run productions on your desk. You add high value to your products, and with relatively low investments in equipment. This means it will be a race where the lean may outrun the giants. I think this will happened, and I can see no argument against it. If you look at what’s done in nanotech today, a lot of the companies are small. The total sum invested in those companies is really relatively small considering all that’s accomplished, Lennart says. Q: Are Swedes lean ´n mean or fat cats in the race?
– I think everything that pushes for nanotech in Sweden is important. If you look at the global economy it’s apparent that growth is going to take place outside Europe. China for instance, is turning out doctors and engineers at a staggering rate. The Chinese don’t have a lot of old luggage to consider when setting up shop. If we’re to maintain our lifestyle we really need to loose the prestige and roll up our sleeves and get to work. There are two ways of looking at living standard; the absolute and the relative. It is the relative that drives the development and I think in the future other parts of the world may develop to a higher level than what we have today, Lennart says. Q: Do you think investors will begin treating nanotech as a separate investment area?
– I don’t know, I think the word “nano” is too exploited, but then again “BioTech” is too. Nano is a very wide area as it deals with fundamentals. It addresses everything. We’ll never go back to a society that doesn’t apply NanoTech. It’s in no way a hype. We’ve begun to work on projects at the nanoscale and there is no going back. Investors may have a problem committing to long term projects, but there is no stopping progress. It will happen; it’s just a matter of time!
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Yours sincerly, TheArtistFormerlyKnownAsRalph