By Tomb Sweeping Day in early April, the heat has southern Taiwan firmly in its grip. Under the scorching sun that beats down on the Tainan Science Industrial Park in Tainan's Hsinshih Township, construction workers are working flat-out. Eagerly awaiting the month when they will be able to pay their rent and move in, the 70 companies that have committed to facilities here are concerned about construction falling behind schedule.
Taiwan Semiconductor, United Microelectronics and Chi Mei Optoelectronics are among the 70, but not all of the firms are giants. ST&T Biotech, a small family-owned company, will have a 4000-plus square meter factory in the park, where it hopes to ride a wave of success.
A brave charge into high tech
Established in 1990, ST&T xNetwork (ST&T Biotech's parent company) was famous under its old name, ST&T Instrument Corporation, for being the first Taiwanese firm producing sensors and medical equipment to receive certification under both the ISO9001 and EN46001 international quality management standards.
Jonathan Li, the company founder, who speaks in the warm and down-to-earth style of a true Tainan man, is very low key about describing how he got into this business. Originally the owner of a plumbing and electrical supply company, he did a small but steady business in bathtubs and toilets for many years. At the end of the 1980s, when speculative fever was running rampant and the stock market was reaching all-time highs, Li intuitively understood that the Taiwanese economy was in for big change, so he sold his plumbing and electrical business to his brother. On the introduction of a friend, he, at the ripe old age of 53, moved into an entirely new field, making instruments and gauges. He started with relatively simple water and electricity meters.
Not long after, Li's son Tony, who had graduated from the physical therapy department at National Taiwan University medical school and was pursuing graduate studies in New York, decided to join his father's quest and come to work at the company.
"I had spent my entire life studying and teaching," he recalls. "Never had I expected that after I returned to Taiwan in 1988 developments in computers and network technology would change structures of knowledge at such a startling pace." In the past, if you had wanted to gather information, he explains, you had to use note cards, and for medical diagnoses you frequently had to rely on your sense of touch. But with new technological developments, textbooks grew laughably out of date overnight. In today's world, knowledge in any field can be completely overturned in five years. It made him wonder what was the point of studying so hard. And so Tony Li gave up on his dream of studying for a doctorate and resolved to return to Taiwan and join the ranks of those working to bring about technological developments.
Technology needs precision
Neither father nor son had a background in technology, but Tony Li thought that they just needed to find the right people and develop a product and that they would soon start to acquire and develop technology of their own. He believed that founding a technology company needn't be a pie-in-the-sky dream.
ST&T Instruments continued to make water and electrical meters, but it also began to set its sights higher. Its first information technology product was an oscilloscope that measured voltage, resistance and diodes. It was an extremely precise electrical meter that allowed for the storage and processing of data. It also had an easy-to-read graphic interface that displayed waveforms.
To develop this new oscilloscope, ST&T spent five years independently developing an analog-digital IC. In 1995 it was the first company in the world to offer a hand-held oscilloscope, which won it a Research Award for Originality from the Ministry of Economic Affairs. Afterwards, the company forged ahead without concern for the difficulties or the potential for failure, and introduced a digital oscilloscope that could also measure electrical current.
"Precision instruments are the basis of high tech," says Tony Li. ST&T Instruments had learned a lot from making meters and other measuring devices and decided to press ahead into a realm of still higher technology: sensors.
"Originally our goal was to use our experience with measuring devices and meters and apply it to producing medical instruments," explains Tony Li. For example, just this year, the company released its Holter Recorder-an electrocardiogram that can record pulse rates for 48 straight hours and feed this information into a computer for analysis. It is the precious fruit of many years of hard work.
Sensors: new age technology
It was in order to search for breakthroughs in measuring technologies that Tony Li sought out the Industrial Technology Research Institute in 1997. As a result, not only did the company hire away David Tu, a research director at ITRI, but they also discovered a changeable realm of "sensation" that they could probe apart from the realm of pure measurements. Sensor technology, which combines these two realms, has a wide range of potential applications.
Tony Li explains that not all phenomena are suited to being displayed in a linear format like electrical resistance and pulse rates. The marvelous thing about sensors is that they can detect a great variety of physical and chemical changes and convert them into signals in the form of electical voltage or resistance, that can then be conveniently measured, analyzed and transmitted.
To cite an example, electronic noses have recently been a hot item in the United States and Europe. One of their functions is to select the best roses for turning into perfume. There are also electronic tongues that can taste (or actually smell) if food has salmonella. This is no mean feat, since the device must pick out the one "stinky" smell denoting danger from many benign ones. It requires enormously complex and precise differentiation and filtering capabilities.
In comparison to the products made by the leading sensor-technology nations (the United States, Britain, and Germany), the mid-level sensors produced by ST&T are not nearly so complex, but they have wider applications.
While the technological platform for sensor technology is extremely broad, ST&T's area of focus in the field mainly involves electronics and semiconductors. The company has developed a whole series of sensor software and components, including indoor testing systems. These include a pollution sensor for an air-conditioning system, as well as an alarm system for industrial production that can detect if there are dangerous concentrations of certain particles, such as might cause explosions. Particularly useful for industrial health and safety, products of this type have numerous potential medical and environmental applications.
After ST&T Instrument Corporation had successfully developed sensors, it opened a new company under the name ST&T Biotech and applied to gain entry to the Tainan Science Industrial Park. Deciding to turn over an entirely new leaf, they even changed the name of ST&T Instrument to ST&T xNetworks.
Endless applications
David Tu, head of research and development at ST&T, offers the following example of how sensors can be used: Every winter in Taiwan, when people tightly close their windows to keep out the cold, some die as a result of carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning or gas leaks. For example, at concentrations over 1000 ppm CO can cause acute poisoning, but the company's CO sensor can detect levels as low as 1 ppm. If one were installed in every household, there would be no more instances of people being poisoned as they bathed or of older couples blowing themselves up as they boiled water.
Because there are so many wonderful uses for sensors, the National Science Council listed them as a scientific and technological focal point more than 10 years ago, and the ITRI started to research and develop them. Unfortunately, at that time most investors were focused on the stock and real estate markets, and the hot electronics sector swept away all investment capital. This left no money whatsoever for unfashionable fields such as sensors. Back when ST&T participated in the "Sensor Component Development" planning project, many companies expressed an interest, but only ST&T ended up pressing ahead.
Tony Li sighs as he relates that under mainland China's tenth five-year economic plan, sensors were included in the "torch plan" as an item of particular importance. A special research park on the mainland will be given over exclusively to researching and developing sensors and related technologies. In Taiwan, on the other hand, the sensor industry is much weaker. Furthermore, he notes that there is good basic research conducted on the mainland. The PRC are behind only in their ability to design products. "Taiwan probably has a lead of just two to three years," he says, seemingly hearing the hounds at his heels.
Integrating technologies
One reason why few companies have invested in sensors is their "trans-industrial" nature. In this respect the field of sensors is similar to the IC industry, which integrates technologies from material science, electronic circuit design, structural packaging, and sputter deposition of thin film coatings. Apart from the complex designs of the sensor components themselves, they also must be combined with different specialized technologies, depending upon what they are designed to do.
Sensitive materials, including such expensive metals as gold and silver, are at the heart of any sensor device. There are three major technological hurdles. The first is sensitivity, which is closely related to the formula used for the sensor material. These formulas are the biggest secrets that the company has, notes Tony Li, and only three people in the entire company know what they are. In order to keep them from being exposed, the company hasn't even applied for patents.
The second hurdle is accuracy, which here also means stability. Measurements of the gas targeted for detection must be turned into linear electronic signals. At the same time, interference that could lead to the transmission of incorrect values must be avoided at all costs.
Say, for instance, that you were cooking chicken soup with rice wine in it. The airborne particles of alcohol would multiply the apparent concentration of carbon monoxide. Unless the sensor was specially designed to avoid this sort of misreading, it would cause a false alarm.
The third hurdle is reaction speed, which is related to the structure of the electronics and the packaging technology of the components. With a short reaction time, a product will have much higher added value.
Since the efficient use of materials affects the profitability of any company, the platinum, gold and other precious metals used in sensors can of course not be used wastefully. ST&T uses them at an efficiency rate of over 80%. The manufacturing know-how that allows it to reach this high figure is one of the secrets to its success. Apart from contractors responsible for repairing equipment, ST&T refuses to allow anyone to visit its facilities.
Tony Li notes that since last year it has been able to obtain sensitive materials created from processed precious metals in Taiwan. Furthermore, since Taiwanese companies excel as contractors for IC design and wafer fabrication, the company needn't worry about foreign companies having a stranglehold over key parts. And with Taiwan's wafer fabs having reached the nanometer scale in the miniaturization of circuitry, ST&T can look forward to its sensors becoming ever smaller and ever more energy efficient.
Household energy control systems
The third focus of ST&T's business strategy is developing new computer and communications technology that can offer a greater number of sensor applications. "Just developing a simple meter or sensor that can take and record an accurate reading doesn't meet the needs of this age of networks and high-speed connections," remarks Tony Li. As a result, ST&T has decided to foray into the downstream sections of "information transfer," combining measuring (via sensors) with information transfer. "For instance, a thermometer could sense that an elderly person had a fever, and if their son or daughter were within 100 kilometers, a warning alarm could ring on their cellular phone."
In order to research and develop these technologies that span the gap from sensors to electronic communications, ST&T plucked Chen Tu-sheng from the ITRI's Center for Measurement Standards. Two years ago he oversaw the development of a "household automatic controller," that could remotely control a home's lights, electric curtains and so forth. And recently, he has launched a "household energy system controller" that takes this concept to a new level.
From the PDA-sized screen of a "household energy system controller," a consumer can clearly see the energy use status of a household at any given minute or second. Based on studies in Japan, when consumers go from "being concerned only about the bill" to being "conscious of their consumption of energy," reductions of more than 20% can result. This would be of tremendous assistance in battling the greenhouse effect and other environmental ills.
What is more, ST&T's energy controller has many advanced functions, such as automatic readings and an "intelligent electric meter." Users can set a monthly energy usage limit that will trigger an alarm when exceeded. Or it can be programmed to remind you that energy appliances such as dryers are best used when the rates are low at night. The user can even install intelligent modules on separate electrical devices and conveniently and precisely control the energy use of each.
All-powerful electric cables
"By the end of this year we will be introducing a household energy control system, at the same time as American manufacturers," says Tony Li with great satisfaction. He predicts that within the next year data about water, gas, and even solar-powered instrument panels will come within the company's technological grasp, enabling it to bring about total energy control. These new ST&T devices in combination with the firm's toxic gas sensors and light sensors (the display for which can, if needed, be shrunk to the size of a PDA screen) have been attracting the attention of those who construct intelligent buildings.
While most information transfer relies upon telephone lines, broadband wireless, cable, Ethernet and so forth, ST&T uses an even newer technology: power line carriers (PLC). This system uses electric cables to do double duty as both a power supply and information conveyer. There's no need to install any other wire.
Tony Li laughs and says that no matter how advanced measuring devices are, line repairmen nearly go crazy whenever they see the twisted tangle of cables that typically accompany them. Cables are truly one of the ugliest inventions of the 20th century. The advantage of PLC systems is that they simplify the whole problem of cables. Since the power lines run to and through the walls of every household, why can't they be used to transmit and carry more things? And the equipment that uses the electricity system in this way can be plug and play, so you won't have a lot of electromagnetic waves in the air causing radiation damage. It's an ideal transmission tool.
After the privatization of the electricity industry in Europe, many electric companies planned to turn themselves into providers of systems that transmitted information. As a result, PLC technology has quickly proliferated there. Tony Li believes that if somehow they can get around the problem of electric lines being connected to too many old electric appliances and also overcome the interference caused by motors whose noise exceeds safety regulations, then PLC technology should have a bright future.
Waiting to fly
Located a ten-minute drive from its yet-to-be completed factory in the Tainan Industrial Science Park, ST&T is not wasting a moment in its old facility in the Yungkang Industrial Park.
Currently, all of its production facilities are in Taiwan, but it has set up a research and development center in Shanghai with some 20 workers. "In the future, we hope that we can treat the mainland as a home market and sell our own brands there."
Tony Li does not refrain from mentioning that ST&T's own brands account for only about 20% of its production. In mainland China, it sees a market with no frightening competitors, where consumers have yet to build up consciousness about brands. It is an ideal place for ST&T to go all out pushing its own brands. And now that the PRC has joined the WTO, it must follow the laws and conventions of international trade. Taiwanese businesses have protection there, and now await only the "three links" (direct shipping, flights and mail across the Taiwan Strait).
ST&T's new facilities are almost completed, but unfortunately the economy has remained weak. Tony Li says with frustration that when the company went to America for Comdex last November, attendance reached only about a third of previous years. It seems that Taiwanese companies are the only firms that remain "fearless in the face of death." Attendance at CeBit in Hanover in March was also down by 20%. With the unpredictable nature of economic cycles, the company is being very careful.
Although the economy is weak, ST&T has been hard at work for many years and now has the good fortune to be able to enjoy the fruits of its past labors. For ST&T xNetwork's original business in electronic meters, sales have doubled in one year from NT$50 million to NT$100 million. The plant in the Tainan Industrial Science Park is expected to be open in July, and it will be dedicated to producing sensors for ST&T Biotech. They expect sales to total NT$40 million by the end of the year. From a plumbing and electrical supplies business to reaching its dreams in high tech, ST&T's journey is a classic example of Taiwan's economic vitality.
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The father was a dealer in plumbing and electrical supplies and the son was a stellar student who attended medical school at National Taiwan University. Yet, while Jonathan and Tony Li may have entered the world of high tech as laymen, they have since been able to stake out a place for themselves as insiders in the new high tech field of sensors.
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Control of natural resources is one of the era's most pressing issues. With ST&T's energy controller system, you can efficiently get a handle over your own use of electricity. In the future the system will grow more comprehensive by monitoring water and gas use as well.
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The winner of a "Symbol of Excellence" from the ROC government this year, ST&T's Holter electrocardiogram can store readings for up to 48 hours as well as transfer them to a computer. This makes it easy for doctors to download data for analysis.
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Power switches, temperature settings, warning signs. . . with ST&T's automated home system, you can exercise remote control over multiple appliances, all by just gazing upon a small screen.
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"The automation of the home" is the newest thing in high tech. Intelligent housekeeping devices can help you to answer the door, vacuum, make your coffee, and turn on the light . . . . Pretty cool, huh?
(design by Tsai Chih-pen)
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ST&T has moved into high tech by taking sure and steady steps and never being impatient. The photo shows its SMT automated assembly and inspection line at the company's plant in the Yungkang Industrial Park. (photo courtesy of ST&T)
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In Tony Li's hand is a key IC chip that ST&T researched and developed itself. The company holds several international patents on it.
