X-ray sensor maker dpiX bringing Springs back to the future

If dpiX is the future of Colorado Springs, the future looks a lot like the past, hearkening back to the city’s days as the “silicon mountain” of high-tech manufacturing.

DpiX is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of the amorphous silicon sensors that register the images inside digital X-ray machines. It controls 50 percent of the market worldwide — you’ll find its products inside X-ray machines in every major hospital in Colorado and many outpatient clinics, too.

The company is an offshoot of Xerox’s famous Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) — the sensors used to capture X-rays are actually an outgrowth of the technology behind high-speed copiers — and became an independent company in 1999 in Palo Alto, Calif.

Five years ago, dpiX bought an empty computer-chip-fabrication plant on Aeroplaza Drive that was once home to LSI Logic and began refitting it to produce its sensor panels. Frank Caris, dpiX’s president and CEO, said buying an existing facility equipped with a clean room saved millions (the company paid $7.65 million for the property), but getting the facility refitted and operating still cost more than $100 million and took until 2008.

DpiX Chief Financial Officer Jason Lachance likened it to “buying a car without an engine or any seats.”

It was only in July that Caris used a visit from Gov. John Hickenlooper as an opportunity to announce that the plant was fully up to speed — and that dpiX was formally moving its headquarters to Colorado Springs.

“We are now able to produce our full product portfolio in Colorado Springs,” Caris said. “This is not a standard semiconductor fab. This is a fab that has unique tools, unique technology.”

For more than a decade, Colorado Springs has watched its electronics-manufacturing base whither — Inmos, Intel, Sanmina-SCI. Today, Atmel and a number of smaller firms remain.

Caris said he believes dpiX’s move might be the first step toward reversing that trend.

DpiX’s plant covers 239,200-square feet, including a 54,000-square-foot clean room that is 10 times the size of its old facility in Palo Alto, and includes 26 surrounding acres — plenty of room to grow. DpiX employs about 150 in Colorado Springs, a number that should increase gradually as production shifts from Palo Alto and the company expands, Caris said. DpiX is privately held and doesn’t release earnings, but the company has grown steadily, Caris said.

“Even in an economic downturn, our market continued to grow,” Caris said.

Shawn O’Rourke, dpiX’s chief technology officer, said digital X-rays are moving out of hospitals and into clinics and doctor’s offices. “You see a continuous, rapid growth in digital X-ray,” he said. “It’s a very, very dynamic market.”

Just as important as internal growth, Caris said, is dpiX’s potential as a magnet to attract similar companies.

“We really hope that our presence will attract other companies that work in those fields,” Caris said.

A skilled local workforce — many dpiX employees are veterans of Intel or other semiconductor manufacturers — was a draw, Caris said, along with quality of life, cost of living and an empty fab available at an affordable price. Those same factors may attract display companies (dpiX’s sensors are more akin to LCD TVs than they are to computer chips), solar panels or related technologies.

Dave Csintyan, CEO of the Greater Colorado Springs Chamber of Commerce, said that vision is exactly the sort of asset Colorado Springs needs to grow.

“Having an anchor like dpiX, very high-end, clean-tech manufacturing that serves an international audience, I think it’s certainly an economic development opportunity that’s squarely ours to go after,” Cstinyan said. “I’m working with Frank to connect him with other civic leaders and elected officials to make sure they hear him and share his vision — I think he’s a huge asset to our community in terms of future opportunities.”

Caris has seen the then-and-now in Colorado Springs. A native of the Netherlands, Caris came to Colorado Springs 17 years ago to work for optical drive manufacturer LMSI, a unit of Philips, the Dutch electronics giant. He likes how the Springs has grown up during his absence.

“I think the town has achieved way more appeal for outsiders,” Caris said. “The city has matured, I think.”

“We get a lot of visitors from other states that are looking to invest in the Colorado area. I think most of them leave pretty impressed.”

CLEANING UP AT DPIX: A TOUR OF THE CLEAN ROOM

Frank Caris, CEO of dpiX, pulls a “bunny suit” over his business suit: A shoe cover followed by an overboot, two pairs of latex gloves, a hair net and a hood, a face mask, glasses and a billowing white set of overalls go over the executive’s lanky frame, all to protect his company’s multimillion-dollar clean room from the dust and dirt of the world outside.

“Dust is a big enemy,” Caris said.

The Colorado Springs company manufactures sensors used in digital X-ray machines.

Employees work 12-hour shifts in the company’s 54,000-square-foot clean room, which occupies about a quarter of dpiX’s plant on Aeroplaza Drive, near the Colorado Springs Airport.

The sensors enter the clean room as blank sheets of thin, flexible glass about the size and shape of a baking sheet. Many smaller sensors or a few large sensors can be printed onto a sheet, in a process similar to making a computer chip.

DpiX’s machinery is adapted from that used to make flat-panel displays. The emphasis, Caris said, is on quality rather than quantity.

“We are not like a chip fab, where you crank out tens of millions of chips,” Caris said. “We talk about tens of thousands instead of millions.”

The glass plates are scarcely touched by human hands — robots load and unload them to and from 20-plate cassettes that bunny-suited workers move around via remote control like rolling refrigerators. The cassettes move between room-size machines that clean, coat, etch, bake and test the plates. Each plate goes through the process many times, as coatings are laid on and layers of sensors are etched into the surface until it resembles a microscopic city.

Under a microscope, the cells on the sensors look like an Excel spreadsheet, Caris said. And every one of them is important when doctors are hunting for a cancer the size of a grain of sand, or engineers are looking for tiny flaws in a part.

“We cannot afford to have a couple of these pixels not working,” Caris said.

Workers hunched over a computer display repair plates with defects by zapping them with a laser, the blasts of light flashing behind smoked glass a few feet away. Every plate is tested and customers get a set of photos from the process to guarantee the sensor’s quality.

“As you work on products like this, quality is very important,” Caris said.

DpiX’s sensors don’t directly detect X-rays. After the sensors leave the company’s plant, its customers coat them with cesium iodide crystals that scintillate when struck by X-rays, producing ordinary light that actually goes to the detector.

After finishing his tour, Caris’ gloves, hair net and shoe covers go in the trash, the rest goes to the cleaners.

The company’s laundry bill, Caris said, is enormous.