Superconductor Technologies Inc, of Santa Barbara, California, a supplier of high-temperature superconductor products for the wireless communications, aerospace electronics, high-speed computing and medical imaging markets, has reported progress in the development of its high-temperature superconducting thin film filtering and cryocooling technologies. The company invested $1.4m in the first quarter of this year, mostly in its cellular base station receiver filter and aerospace switchable filterbank. Nearly two thirds of these costs were offset by increased government contract and commercial product revenues in the same half, which were up 8.2% to $2.1m and 3.6% to $203,000, respectively. As a result of the increased investment, the company has formed its first two strategic business units Wireless Communications and Government Products. These will accelerate the delivery to the market of products from the cellular filter and aerospace filterbank. The two units will operate independently. The company has also promised to create additional business units as and when the product development and business climates warrant it. The core product of the new Government Products unit is the filterbank, which can filter up to 32 microwave signals, as opposed to conventional filters with a maximum of only one or two signals when tuned electronically. The product is aimed firstly at the defence industry where the need to block multiple microwave signals is becoming increasingly important. An example of this was the Gulf War, where friendly and enemy signals flooded the airwaves and made identification difficult. The company believes that future filterbanks could filter as many as 90 or more microwave channels. Superconductor Technologies’ other new product, the superconductor cellular base station, is designed to replace existing base stations that receive and transmit calls for cellular phone users. They are intended to filter or eliminate undesired frequencies, but the airwaves are so crowded that inadequate filtering is becoming common, causing static interference and dropped calls. The company claims that its superconducting cellular filtering system, including cryogenic packaging and cooling, will provide superior performance at one fifteentht the size of the conventional wave guide filter sets. In June last year, the company built the world’s first superconductor cellbase station filter and won a contract to build a specific cellular filtering system last autumn. This will be delivered for testing this autumn.
