Mtech Press Releases

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 26, 2003

Successful High Tech Executive Joins UM Incubator Company

COLLEGE PARK, Md.—Dr. John S. McKillop spent 20 years building start-up companies, including one that sold for $640 million. His family lives in Seattle. So why is he leaving all that behind to join a small, incubator-based firm at the University of Maryland?

"It's the old risk-reward quotient," said McKillop, the new chief executive officer of Advanced Thermal and Environmental Concepts, Inc. (ATEC). "No risk, no reward," he said.

The reward with ATEC, McKillop thinks, could be big.

On the surface, ATEC is a contract engineering company specializing in thermal management solutions. But that's only half the story. ATEC is also developing electronics cooling technologies that could provide a solution to looming heat dissipation problems in computer processors.

A success there, McKillop says, will be the entrepreneurial equivalent of a home run.

"In three to five years existing cooling technologies will not be sufficient for microprocessors," he explained. "Many companies are working on it--but that's what makes horse races."

McKillop has a good eye for horses when it comes to technology. He's led or held senior management positions at five start-up companies, including the optical switching company Bainbridge Networks, surgical laser firm Surgilase, and RTP-based Cronos Integrated Microsystems--one of the biggest names in micro-electro-mechanical systems-based (MEMS) technologies. Cronos was acquired by JDS Uniphase for $640 million in 2001.

McKillop also founded and led The Laser Company, which specialized in high-performance laser technologies developed by McKillop—and eventually licensed to a public laser firm.

ATEC, founded in 1998 by University of Maryland mechanical engineering professor Michael Ohadi, joined the university's technology company incubator, the Technology Advancement Program, in 2000. The company has since secured more than $5 million in government contracts for thermal management solutions and R&D--with the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, Missile Defense Agency, Air Force, Army, and Department of Agriculture.

"We take heat from a location where you don't want it and get it to where you can live with it," said McKillop, "as efficiently and inexpensively as possible. We have best-in-class skills and tools to analyze problems, understand limitations of current systems, and come up with practical solutions."

McKillop plans to grow ATEC's consulting services for the next few years, but it's the company's thermal management technologies that brought him here.

"Everyone is trying to get more capability into a smaller box, generating higher and higher heat densities" he explained. "The tried and true classic approaches aren't working, and companies in industries all over the world are hitting the same wall at the same time."

That wall, according to McKillop, will only get bigger. "Thermal management is a major limitation in advanced military electronics right now," he said, "and it will soon become a major hurdle in microprocessors as well.

"I think we are working on technologies that could provide a solution to that problem. It's too soon to pass judgment, but check back in twelve months."

ATEC has secured two U.S. patents for its technologies and filed four more, as well as multiple provisional patents.

About ATEC

ATEC Inc. provides innovative, proprietary solutions to thermal management and mass transfer problems in an extremely broad range of customer applications. The company's patented innovations include very high heat flux IC coolers, oil-vapor separators for freon-free refrigeration systems, motion-free micro-pumps for cryogenic liquids, and frost reduction devices for commercial freezers and refrigerators.

About the Technology Advancement Program (TAP)

Established in 1985, TAP is a full-service incubator helping early-stage, technology-based companies advance towards maturation by providing technical assistance, business guidance, access to key relationships, and low-cost physical infrastructure. Part of the A. James Clark School of Engineering's Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute at the University of Maryland, College Park, TAP offers companies 21,500 square feet of modern office, laboratory, and manufacturing space, as well as an extensive mentor network to help companies, as needed, with business planning, marketing, recruiting, and capital raising. TAP's six current and 45 graduate companies have created 1,000 jobs and secured $778 million in investment. Both Martek Biosciences and Digene Corporation, companies with a combined market capitalization of $2.5 billion, are TAP graduates, as was Powerize.com, which sold to Hoover's Inc. in 2000 for $17 million.

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