Tetrahive Wins USAF Phase I SBIR Contract

Tetrahive Technologies has been awarded a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract to investigate the feasibility of using X-ray tomography (aka CT scans) to non-destructively and semi-automatically reverse engineer legacy electronics.

“This SBIR program hopes to fill a readiness gap faced by several organizations including our nation’s military. Electronics built for harsh environments often work reliably for decades and as such become ‘cogs in the machine’ that often get taken for granted. But when they do fail, as all parts eventually do, organizations reliant on them are often left with no spares or alternative sources given the age of these components.”

“This emerging technology promises to provide these organizations with the designs (aka technical data packages) from non-destructive evaluation (NDE) of these rare but critical components. These designs are required to produce on-demand or small lot replacements & spares that plug-and-play with existing systems and meet form-fit-function requirements necessary to avoid costly and time-consuming re-certification.”

“We are honored to have been chosen by the USAF for this effort and I am personally very excited about the future of this technology. Especially if it can be paired with advanced manufacturing techniques like 3D printing in the future. An integrated on-demand, non-destructive, re-engineering and manufacturing capability could revolutionalize maintenance and logistics functions for our nation’s military and other organizations that face these issues.”

-Rob Matthews, CEO & Founder

In Phase I, Tetrahive will collaborate with ScanCAD International - a company with a rich tradition in providing destructive re-engineering systems and services. Tetrahive hopes to expand upon this tradition by showing in Phase I that re-engineering of a PCB is feasible using non-destructive CT data and furthermore that portions of workflow - one that is traditionally time-consuming and requires unique human skills - can be done semi-automatically using computational methods.