MC10 CEO David Icke speaking at EMtech 2012.y

This week, the company announced a deal with Reebok to deliver a soft electronic skullcap to be warn under helmets to detect impact. The electronics in that cap will provide athletes, coaches and doctors more data on potential concussions — a huge area of concern for professionals and child athletes alike. In a recent Pop Warner football game in suburban Boston, for example, five kids suffered concussions. The skullcap is due next year.

“It won’t diagnose concussions but will be another set of eyes on the field,” Icke said at MIT’s EMtech 2012 on Thursday.

The company makes the silicon extremely thin and then embeds it in flexible materials. “We build stretchable interconnects, encapsulating all that so it can survive under tough conditions,” he said.

He sees several possible applications. Skin- or tattoo-like sensors could help athletes train up to their peak but prevent them from going overboard, for example. The electronics can also be used in catheter-based devices for minimally invasive procedures. At the other end of the spectrum, thin fabric-like film containing sensors could be used in organ transplant procedures to detect possible rejection or other problems. The company is also working on personal UV and SPF sensors to track sun exposure.

Wearable sensors that provide real-world data — without forcing  the user to input information into a smart phone — could cut healthcare costs and improve care, Icke said.

The ability to continuously track an individual’s  metrics —  heart rate, breathing patterns, or what have you — gives clinicians better and broader data. “Instead of having episodic care, this means you access healthcare only if and when you need it,” Icke said.

Cambridge, MA-based MC10 is hardly flying under the radar. It won the Wall Street Journal‘s innovation award in the semiconductor category earlier this year.

Feature photo courtesy  of Flickr user Schlüsselbein2007

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One of the novelties of mc10′s technology, is that it has so many applications. Medical devices (flexible sensors and surgery tools), clothing with embedded electronics for soldiers or fashion, automotive lighting, or energy and solar technology, like flexible solar panels and movement-powered materials. Yep, picture joggers of the future charging their iPods via their hoodies, and mc1o has an R&D partnership with Reebok for athletic wear.

I first heard about mc10 when the startup won backing, along with researchers from University of Illinois, from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E), which is a DOE program modeled after the Department of Defense’s DARPA program. The idea of ARPA-E is to award small grants to early stage, high-risk projects. mc10 and its research group received $1.71 million to make flexible nano-structured electronics that can convert waste heat into electricity.

At the time of its ARPA-E grant, mc10 said the project involved technical risks, making it hard for them to raises VC funds at that stage. Looks like either those risks were abated, or Braemer and mc10′s other investors, which include North Bridge Venture Partners, Osage University Partners, and Terawatt Ventures, are now willing to swallow the risks. The market size is large enough — scaling up and getting costs low will be the hurdle.

As devices get smaller, and sensors get embedded on everything from pill cap bottles to industrial machinery, new form factors for electronics will be needed. Batteries are going through the same stage of innovation, and ultra-thin and uniquely shaped batteries are being developed.

Image courtesy of pt.

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Phononic is devising high-efficiency systems for both thermoelectric cooling — using electricity to remove heat — and thermoelectric generation that turns waste heat into useful power. It raised $2 million in a previous funding round and landed a $3 million ARPA-E grant in November.

Phononic is aiming at what it describes as a $125 million market for thermoelectric devices, whether that’s in generation or cooling applications. The company is aiming first at cooling applications, an area where solid-state devices have been serving a role for some years.

Turning waste heat into power, on the other hand, is a much broader — but much more diffuse — market. Up to half the energy generated in the U.S. is lost to waste heat, according to ARPA-E Director (and UC Berkeley professor) Arun Majumdar, making it a big target for recycling.

But much of that waste heat is hard to capture. Big industrial waste heat systems generally require pretty high temperatures to do things like turn water into steam to drive turbines. Finding a cheap and reliable thermoelectric method to capture the lower-temperature waste heat could open the door to far more applications.

Several startups are working on it, including Applied Methodologies, which was seeking funding last year to work on thermoelectric generators to capture waste heat from servers and other IT equipment. Another is Alphabet Energy, which landed $1.48 million in research contracts from the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Army last week, on top of a seed round of $1 million from Claremont Creek Ventures and the CalCEF Clean Energy Angel Fund last year. Alphabet hopes to have commercial products in the field by 2012 delivering power for $1 per watt, about 50 times lower than the current generation of thermoelectric materials.

Much of the work underway on thermoelectrics is concentrated on more efficient materials. Tucson, Ariz.-based Tempronics landed $2.7 million from investors including Nth Power last year for its technology to improve thermoelectric efficiencies of different materials, and MC10 landed an ARPA-E grant in 2009 to work on silicon nanotubes for thermoelectric systems.

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Image courtesy of RFC1036 via Creative Commons license.

Right now, the Wantagh, N.Y.-based company says it will cost $10 to $20 per server to install its TGS systems, which can generate 10 volts and 5 amps at current efficiency levels. It will be interesting to see whether it can overcome the challenges in the century-old field of thermoelectrics, which consist of semiconductor materials that generate electricity when exposed to temperature differentials — that is, when one side is hot and the other side is cold. Traditional thermoelectric devices have used bismuth telluride, and have suffered from a key inefficiency — they also conduct heat, meaning that they quickly see temperatures equalize, losing their electricity-generating properties.

Most of the recent research into thermoelectrics has centered around using nanotechnology to design thermoelectric materials that conduct electricity but not heat. In March, researchers at Boston College and MIT announced that they had achieved a major thermoelectric efficiency increase in bismuth telluride by breaking it down and “rebuilding it in a composite of nanostructures in bulk form,” according to Boston College physicist Zhifeng Ren.

Other startups appear to be pursuing similar nanotechnology routes to more efficient thermoelectric devices. In May, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory spin-out Alphabet Energy landed a seed round of $1 million from Claremont Creek Ventures and the CalCEF Clean Energy Angel Fund to work on its thermoelectric materials, which it claims will be 50 times cheaper than existing materials, bringing its power generating costs to around $1 per watt. In March, Tucson, Ariz.-based Tempronics announced it had landed $2.7 million from investors including Nth Power for its technology to improve thermoelectric efficiencies of different materials, and MC10 and Photonic Devices have gotten ARPA-E grants to develop thermoelectrics from silicon nanotubes and nanowires, respectively.

As for where thermoelectrics can be put to most effective use, most of the companies in the field are targeting high-heat environments such as heavy manufacturing, automotive, aerospace and power generation. The U.S. loses roughly half of the energy it consumes to waste heat, according to U.C. Berkeley professor Arun Majumdar, providing a wide-open field for innovation to capture it beyond the simple mechanical waste heat generation systems out there today.

Whether or not thermoelectric can be made efficient enough to run at the relatively cooler temperatures that data center operators run their centers at remains an open question. But there’s no doubt that data centers are hot targets for energy efficiency innovation — according to Pike Research, global investment into green data centers will grow from $7.5 billion this year to some $41.4 billion by 2015.

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Cleantech Market Overview, Q1 2010