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Hello, Mr. Chips

Microchip innovator Gary Maki brings his team of engineers to
University of Idaho’s Post Falls research park
By Becky Kramer / Staff Writer

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Post Falls – NASA engineer Pen-Shu Yeh runs into some peculiar challenges in her work developing new space technologies.

For 14 years, University of Idaho professor Gary Maki has been her go-to man.

Satellite computer chips that don’t burn up from the sun’s radiation? Maki and his team of researchers designed them.

A chip that corrects data transmission errors from the Hubble Space Telescope? Another project of Maki’s team.

Chips that will cut the power needs of satellites by 70 percent? Again, the work of Maki et al.

“This is a very unique team specializing in space electronics,” said Yeh, who works at the Goddard Space Flight Center near Washington, D.C. In a coup for the region, Maki is back in North Idaho after a 10-year stint at the University of New Mexico. He and his 15-engineer team have created a stir since August, when they moved into the UI’s research park in Post Falls.

“I’ve gotten a lot of phone calls from people who want to meet him, who want to give him their resume, or who want him to look over their project,” said Doug McQueen, research park director. “I’ve even had a few phone calls from investors, wondering if he’s developing anything they can put venture capital money into.”

Maki, 59, is a kindly, bespectacled man who racks up “most popular professor” awards as well as government contracts. Last month, he charmed the Post Falls chamber crowd by blushing over a slide of a computer chip that appeared upside down during his luncheon presentation. The week before, he was in Washington, D.C., pitching ideas for the low-power chips to the military.

“We want to be a team,” Maki said, “that the government can go to to design their technology.”

Maki’s groundbreaking work in radiation-tolerant electronics allowed NASA to send their chips to commercial foundaries for production, instead of to a few government sponsored labs, Yeh said. His team’s work in error correction and data compression is widely used in space craft.

The Landsat 7 – whose luminous images of the Earth make the Florida Everglades look like a blue-green spatter painting – uses chips designed by the Maki team. So does the Mars Odyssey, launched last year to make detailed observations about the red planet’s climate and geology.

“I want his stuff on my satellite,” said John Oberright, a NASA systems engineer who selected Maki’s ultra-low power chips for a test mission that will be flown in two years.

Chips that use less electricity would allow NASA to reduce the size of solar panels and batteries on space craft. That means smaller, cheaper satellites, or more room for scientific instruments.

“It would have a dramatic impact on mission capacity,” said Oberright. And, “we’re all trying to save money these days.”

Maki sees other applications for low-power chips, including patches foot soldiers could wear on their clothing that would receive satellite images of terrain or troop movements.

“Gary’s constantly thinking,” said Dave McKinney, University of New Mexico’s former vice president of finance, who also worked with Maki at the UI. “He’s got more ideas than you’d be able to bring to reality in one lifetime.”

Despite $27 million in government contracts awarded to his research team and two dozen patents, Maki has chosen to remain in an academic setting. That’s unusual, McKinney said.

“He’s kind of an ideal research professor,” McKinney said. “He’s creative. He’s got great ideas. But instead of leaving the university and creating companies, he would rather work with the universities to commercialize that technology.”

For Maki, a Michigan native who excelled at math and earned his doctorate in his mid-20s, new ideas have always had a stronger pull than entrepreneurship.

“I think I speak for the team when I say that our joy is research and developing new technologies,” Maki said. “If you go out and start a company, you have to stay in one field. Maybe I’d be a horrible businessman.”

Maki also credits McKinney for keeping him in academia with university policies that allowed professors to retain part of the royalties on technology they developed, and sit on the boards of spinoff companies.

Maki’s past work has led to four small start-up companies. The presence of a chip research team in Post Falls could help attract other components of the high-tech industry, said McQueen, the research park’s director.

“Often, a design institute like this is the catalyst to start the chain of events that would lead to fabrication plants in the future,” McQueen said.

Maki’s new quarters at UI’s research park contain $4 million in sophisticated computer equipment. The new “Center for Advanced Microelectronics and Biomolecular Research” is light years away from “the Dungeon,” a basement computer room on UI’s Moscow campus where Maki’s work in space electronics began.

A summer fellowship Maki did at NASA in 1979 coincided with graduate level classes he was teaching to working engineers.

“Getting involved with engineers in industry was exciting. They did things theory said you couldn’t do,” Maki said.

Maki employs university graduate students and engineers to work with him on NASA research. The agency had a particularly pressing problem: U.S. satellites were picking up static from Russian radar frequency when they flew over Eastern Europe.

“Whenever the satellite was pointed at the radars, they’d get the noise. It’s like when you’re listening to the radio, and you drive to close to a radio station,” Maki said.

Using an algorithm developed by two professors from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Maki and his team created chips that allowed satellites to beam error-free transmissions through Russian radar, lightning and even space dust.

The chips were a breakthrough at the time because of the high volume of calculations they did – about 1.25 billion math computations per second. Even the late Gustave Solomon, one of the authors of the algorithm, was skeptical.

“He told me he didn’t think it could operate that fast,” Maki said.

Maki went to McKinney for $100,000 to hire a few engineers to work with him. The request came at a time of state budget cuts for Idaho’s higher education system.

“He said yes,” Maki said. “He’s the true champion of the program. If he had said no, none of this would have happened.”

The young microelectronics research center also got a boost from Hewlett-Packard in Boise, which allowed Maki to use the company’s superior computer system.

“He’d come in and use our computers at night. That was a terrible thing to do to anybody,” said HP employee Ken Eldredge. “He’d work till 4 or 5 in the morning. He was a very dedicated individual, and he was trusted and given access to the plant.”

Maki hopes to continue the ground-breaking research that gave the institute its national reputation. His wife, biochemist Wusi Maki, is one of the 15 researchers at the Center for Advanced Microelectronics and Biomolecular Research.

“At 6:30 in the morning my wife will wake up and say, ‘I’ve got an idea.’ She’ll start talking about some molecular structure she thought of during the night,” Maki said.

The couple, who have been married five years, met at a NASA conference in Florida. They plan to bring their different fields together to collaborate on work in disease detection.

“It’s a great combination of expertise,” said Yeh, the NASA engineer. “I would love to see what will come out of it. It will be something very interesting.”