Tech Transfer - Evigia Systems

Industry > Technology Transfer > Evigia Systems

Evigia Systems
Founded:	2004
Founder:	Navid Yazdi (PhD EE '99)
Product/Service:	Integrated Active RFID Sensors, Transponders, Tags and Readers
Location:	Ann Arbor, MI
Website:	evigia.com
Evigia is the industry leader in utilizing integrated sensor and ASIC technologies to dramatically improve the functionality and cost of wireless and sensing products. These advances allow significant improvement in the performance and cost of asset-management supply chains. The network's functionality, visibility, and security control are dramatically increased, while the underlying hardware products themselves benefit from smaller size, lower power consumption, and lower cost with our solution approach. [Evigia Website, About Us]

In the News

February 21, 2012

Frost & Sullivan Lauds Evigia for its Extensive Line of RFID-Sensing Products

Evigia recognized for delivering unmatched value in Active RFID and Wireless Sensing

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - Tuesday, February 21, 2012 - Based on its recent analysis of the wireless sensing solutions market, Frost & Sullivan recognizes Evigia with the 2011 North America Frost & Sullivan Award for Product Line Strategy. Evigia leverages its position and knowledge of active radio frequency identification (RFID) and integrated sensing to develop a comprehensive range of products that includes RFID tags, integrated sensors, readers and transponders. The company's feature-rich and cost-efficient line of products enables it to cater to a number of demanding applications across various industry verticals.

[read more]

© Mireya Espinoza, Frost & Sullivan

Dec 21, 2010

EECS Spinoffs Recognized as Key Innovators in Business Competition

Competing with more than 600 companies for more than $1M in awards, Arbor Photonics took 2nd place overall and $150K, while Evigia was awarded a prize of $25K in the category of Defense & Homeland Security at The Accelerate Michigan Innovation Competition, held December 9-11. Both companies are spinoffs of Electrical and Computer Engineering faculty and students.

In the student competition, the company Reveal Design Automation earned 2nd place and $15K, while MiEND-Drug Screeners took 3rd place and $10K.

The international competition was open to start-up companies interested in doing business in Michigan, and attracted business plans from 13 states and 4 countries.

Company Competition

Arbor Photonics
2nd Place Overall

"Arbor Photonics is developing high power, fiber laser solutions for advanced materials processing and defense applications. The company's products will be lasers and lasers subsystems that enable increased productivity and new capabilities in the growing $2 billion industrial laser market. Specific applications include current and next generation manufacturing of solar cells, microelectronics, flat panel displays and LEDs. Target customers are original equipment manufacturers and defense contractors. Unsurpassed product performance is achieved with unique 3C Fiber technology, licensed exclusively from the University of Michigan that can economically deliver 2 to 5 times more power and processing speed than competing alternatives.

Founded in 2007 by Prof. Almantas Galvanauskas, Dr. Michelle Stock, and Phillip Amaya, the company currently employs 10 people in 3,800 sq ft of laboratory and office space in Ann Arbor. The company has been awarded three Small Business Innovative Research awards from the Navy and National Science Foundation and a third is pending with the Army." [Source: Accelerate Michigan: Award Winners]
Prof. Almantas Galvanauskas, ECE faculty member and Chief Scientist of the company, stated "this award shows that we have taken this long path from an idea to an organization. We are now at the stage where we are pursuing additional ideas, and looking to grow the organization. Arbor Photonics is currently developing alpha prototypes that customers are evaluating for integration into their systems.

Evigia
Defense & Homeland Security Sector Award Winner

Evigia is a leading provider of wireless sensing, identification and tracking products and solutions targeting military, security, and commercial applications. The Evigia products advantage is in longer battery life, smaller form factor, and functionality per unit cost that all achieved through Evigia's technology for integration of electronics and sensing functions on an integrated silicon chip. Evigia is one of the three companies with full suite of wireless sensor hardware products selected by US Department of Defense (DoD) for its global Total Visibility & In-Transit Asset Visibility (TAV & ITV) program under RFID-III umbrella contract with a ceiling of $428M over 5 years. The Evigia common wireless sensing platform is employed in Evigia product variations including electronic seals for securing containers and hazardous material transportation, wireless sensor tags for asset location and condition tracking, machine health monitoring, and smart infrastructure.

Evigia is based in Ann Arbor and was founded in 2004 by Navid Yazdi (PhD EE), who serves as CEO of the company, and ECE faculty Khalil Najafi, Schlumberger Professor of Engineering and ECE Chair, and Ken Wise, William Gould Dow Distinguished University Professor, serve as advisors to the company.

Student Competition

Reveal Design Automation

Presenters: Zaher Andraus (MSE CSE 2004), Vimal B. Bhalodia (Business Admin. student), Matthew Neagle (Business Admin. student)

Reveal Design Automation was founded by Prof. Karem Sakallah and his former students Zaher Andraus (PhD CSE; Research Fellow at U-M) and Mark Liffiton (PhD CSE; Asst. Professor at Illinois Wesleyan U.). The company provides the electronic design market with the best possible software tools to verify correctness of complex, digital chip designs. Semiconductor companies currently spend $100M to develop a high-end chip, with half that cost spent on verification — the process of ensuring a chip design meets specifications and is fault-free. Leading chip design firms are actively adopting a new generation of methodologies called formal verification that drastically reduce the effort in verification and probability of missing a bug. However, existing formal verification tools do not scale with complexity of modern designs. Reveal is the first to solve this critical problem. [Source: Accelerate Michigan Student Award Winners]

The company placed 6th out of 42 in the 2010 Rice University Business Plan Competition. [Read more]

MiEND - Drug Screeners

Presenters: Trushal V. Chokshi (EE PhD Student), Dariusz Banasik (Business Admin. student)

Mr. Chokshi describes the need for MiEND-Drug Screeners: "Neurodegenerative diseases currently affect over 10 million people globally. These diseases have a 20% growth rate and have led pharmaceutical companies to pursue cures. However, the expenses incurred for conducting preclinical drug screening on tissue cultures of mice can be prohibitively high. In order to reduce these costs, there has been a significant interest in conducting preclinical drug screening on a micro organism named ‘C. elegans’. However, due to their small size, conducting preclinical drug screening on them is skill intensive and requires manual labor, resulting in low-throughput. Thus, there is an unmet need for a technology that could screen neurodegenerative medicinal compounds on C. elegans in a rapid and automated manner."

Mr. Chokshi stated that they have developed such a technology in the lab: "Increased automation in our product platform eliminates the need for skilled/manual labor and can potentially increase the throughput to several hundred folds. ‘MiEND - Drug Screeners’ aim to capitalize on this technology platform by providing neurodegenerative drug screening services to various pharmaceutical companies and academic institutions."

The concept behind MiEND - Drug Screeners was developed by Prof. Nikos Chronis, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and implemented by three of his students, Trushal Chokshi (EE PhD Student), Daphne Bazopoulou (PhD, Biological Sciences) and Spencer Marsh (BSE ME).

Expand this Article Hide

Apr 14, 2010

Evigia Announces Mobile All-in-One RFID Reader

The company, which provides RFID hardware to the U.S. Department of Defense and its vendors, has added its active 433 MHz reader module and software to Motorola's MC9090-G handheld interrogator, to create its new EV3-HHI-PAB device.

Evigia Systems, a provider of active RFID technology that sells largely to the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and its vendors, as well as to companies in the cold chain and logistics industries, has announced a new handheld RFID reader that combines active, passive and bar-code reading capabilities. The EV3-HHI-PAB device is based on Motorola's MC9090-G RFID handheld computer that comes with an integrated passive RFID interrogator complying with the ISO 18000-6c and EPC Gen 2 standards, as well as a bar-code scanner.

"All of the passive aspects of the Motorola reader remain the same," says Evigia's CEO, Navid Yazdi. "We added our active reader module and developed software to handle all the features, which include the ability to scan bar codes, read passive and active tags, and filter, collect and store the data to a database, or to active tags' memory." The device can also encode data to ISO 18000-6c/EPC Gen 2 passive tags.

Yazdi says he knows of no other handheld device currently on the market that combines active, passive and bar-code technologies. Evigia, he adds, developed the product with the DOD and its vendors in mind. The DOD employs bar codes, as well as active and passive RFID technologies, as tools for tracking materiel, as part of its In-Transit Visibility (ITV) Network. The EV3-HHI-PAB's active tag technology, originally developed by Savi, is licensed to a number of tag and reader providers, including Evigia, and has been standardized under the International Standards Organization as ISO 18000-7. Evigia is also a member of the Dash7 Alliance, an industry collaboration that is developing applications for wireless sensor devices based on the ISO 18000-7 standard, for use in military, commercial and consumer applications.

The Department of Defense has been adding a requirement to its vendor contracts for nearly five years, mandating that vendors attach passive RFID tags to all shipments of goods they sell to the DOD. The vendors also use bar-code labels to identify goods, and DOD cargo containers are often identified and tracked using active ISO 18000-7 tags. The EV3-HHI-PAB will enable users to take advantage of all three technologies in a single device.

The EV3-HHI-PAB can be linked to the ITV Network through connectivity software sold separately, Yazdi notes. End users shipping temperature-sensitive goods, he says, can also utilize it to read passive RFID tags attached to cases or pallets of goods, as well as collect temperature history information stored on active RFID tags with integrated sensors. What's more, Yazdi indicates, companies that employ ISO 18000-7 electronic seals (e-seals)—used to secure shipping containers, and to alert users to any evidence of tampering—could benefit from using the handheld device to track cargo within the containers, as well as read information stored on the e-seals.

The addition of the active reader module and antenna to Motorola's handheld computer, Yazdi says, does not significantly impact the device's battery life. "It will operate for anywhere from four to eight hours, depending on how it's being used," he states. "The addition of the active reader makes only about a 10 percent impact on the Motorola battery, because the ISO 18000-7 protocol is designed to be very low-power."

According to Yazdi, the active reader has a range of up to 300 feet.

Evigia will demonstrate the EV3-HHI-PAB in Booth 748 at RFID Journal LIVE! 2010, being held this week in Orlando, Fla. The company has not yet released the price of the device.

Expand this Article Hide

Apr 23, 2009

Evigia receives order for RFID contract

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Northrop Grumman has placed its first order for radio-frequency identification technologies with Evigia Systems as part of a U.S. Defense Department contract.

The Northrop Grumman-Evigia team was selected by the Defense Department to provide RFID technologies and engineering services for the tracking and asset management of government supply chains.

Michigan-based RFID hardware-products developer Evigia announced it received Northrop Grumman's first order for its RFID technologies as part of the Defense Department deal.

"We are committed to the (Defense Department's) desire for an open-standard architecture and increased product diversity in the active RFID marketplace," Navid Yazdi, Evigia chief executive, said in a statement.

"Furthermore, Evigia being part of a team of highly capable companies being primed by Northrop Grumman enables us to deliver a formidable product and solution platform that appropriately addresses (Defense Department) needs.

Information For:

Support EECS

Evigia Systems