What became of ECD after Ovshinsky left? What remains now of his other enterprises, and how much of his legacy is likely to continue? Here we summarize the recent histories of the most important companies and technologies he created.
After Ovshinsky’s “retirement,” when ECD’s new managers discontinued all its programs except batteries and solar (see chapter 11), they focused on maximizing returns from the solar program. United Solar had become the largest US manufacturer of amorphous silicon solar panels.1 ECD’s CEO and its board of directors now attempted to greatly increase production capacity and lower unit costs by raising over $400 million in convertible debentures.
That proved to be a disastrous strategy. The effects of the 2008 recession, which led to the loss of government subsidies for solar energy, combined with drastic price cuts by Chinese makers of polycrystalline silicon solar cells, which their government continued to subsidize, crippled the whole US solar industry. With its huge debt load, ECD could not survive; the company filed for bankruptcy on February 14, 2012.2 United Solar had to sell its assets to pay its creditors. By the following summer the company’s machinery, equipment, inventory, and real estate holdings, as well as its intellectual property, had been auctioned off. It was a heartbreaking experience for those who had invested large portions of their careers in developing the solar technology. Arun Kumar recalled “dismantling stuff for sale as scrap, and that really hurt me. I saw those machines being scrapped, and I wept.”3
Led by Mike Fetcenko, the battery company (now Ovonic Materials Division) continued its work for almost four years after Ovshinsky’s departure from ECD.4 On February 13, 2012, the day before ECD filed for bankruptcy, the division was sold for $58 million to the world’s largest chemical company, BASF (originally Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik). All the employees received job offers from BASF, and all accepted.
The nickel metal hydride battery continues to be commercially important; more than thirty-five BASF licensees pay millions of dollars each year in royalties from their manufacture and sale of Ovonic batteries.5 Five hundred million cells are sold each year, and the NiMH batteries are used to power hybrid electric vehicles, such as the more than five million Toyota Priuses sold over the last nearly twenty years.6 As the leader of all BASF battery activities in North America, including the Battery Materials–Ovonic Division, Fetcenko remarked that BASF is “proud to carry on some of Stan’s legacy. It is very rare at BASF for an acquired company to keep its former name. BASF recognized Stan’s reputation by retaining the name Ovonic.”
Ovshinsky Innovation and its subsidiary Ovshinsky Solar (jointly referred to as OI/OS), ended after Ovshinsky’s death in October 2012. Despite significant progress toward achieving the gigawatt machine, for which Ovshinsky claimed proof of principle, he had been unable to secure funding for the next phase. The project had been supported only by his personal savings, and already in March 2012 he had agreed to start winding it down. In the months after his death, further efforts to find support were also fruitless.
The only real possibility for funding was a Chinese group that had been very interested earlier but withdrew when Ovshinsky demanded more control than they were willing to grant. Now Rosa wrote to them, explaining that with Ovshinsky no longer involved there would be no restrictions. They proposed supporting the research for two or three years, bringing some of their scientists to Michigan to work with the OI/OS researchers and equipment, but only if Rosa, with her physics background and knowledge of Chinese, agreed to participate. This created a painful dilemma for her. Rosa had been initially skeptical about the gigawatt project, but she recognized it had achieved results that warranted further research. She also felt it was important to give Ovshinsky’s last and most ambitious vision a chance to be realized. At the same time, she was still in deep mourning and struggling with the demands of settling the estate. She felt emotionally and practically unable to take on another big commitment and so told the Chinese she could not get involved. For years she continued to regret the loss of this last chance.
The OI/OS assets were liquidated; the same firm that had disposed of ECD’s physical assets and intellectual property auctioned off the expensive, specialized laboratory equipment. “It took us until about February 2013 to dismantle everything,” Dave Strand recalled. Like the bankruptcy of ECD, it was another sad ending, but unlike that earlier debacle, the termination of Ovshinsky’s unrealized gigawatt vision was not a case of total failure but an interrupted story of partial success.
For two years after Ovshinsky left ECD, Ovonyx continued to develop phase-change memory. In 2009, for unknown reasons, this work stopped abruptly and the company became dormant, staffed only by its leader Tyler Lowrey and a skeleton administrative crew. In 2012, after ECD’s bankruptcy, its 38.6% share, including the phase-change memory patents, was sold to Micron.
Little more was heard for some time, but in July 2015 it became clear that the development of phase-change memory had been continuing. That was when Intel and Micron announced their new 3D Xpoint memory chip, “a major breakthrough in memory process technology and the first new memory category since the introduction of NAND flash in 1989.”7 Intense speculation and debate followed about the composition of the new device, which was not initially disclosed.8 Nearly six months later, Intel and Micron confirmed what experienced ECD veterans had already deduced, that this revolutionary new device was essentially the same as the one they had created for Ovshinsky in 1989 (see chapter 10). “Chalcogenide material and an Ovonyx switch are magic parts of this technology with the original work starting back in the 1960s,” said an Intel-Micron executive.9 While not directly acknowledging Ovshinsky as the inventor, this clearly indicates the origins of the 3D Xpoint, which uses Ovonic phase-change memory as its storage element and an Ovonic threshold switch as the access device. Those who helped to develop phase-change memory at ECD and Ovonyx had thought it might be decades before flash memory reached its limits and phase-change came into its own, but that may already be happening. It seems likely that Ovshinsky’s breakthrough discovery in his storefront will play an important role in the information technology of the twenty-first century.10
A further development of phase-change memory, the cognitive computer never went beyond the research stage at ECD (see chapter 10), but it too now seems to be coming closer to realization. In August 2016, IBM announced its development of an “artificial neuron,” a device that will be able to “handle huge volumes of data at a fraction of the energy cost of conventional chips.”11 From the description of this device, it appears to be essentially the same as the cumulative phase-change switches Ovshinsky reported in 2008.12 It is “made from a chalcogenide-based crystal,” and “fires when it reaches a certain threshold,” changing “from an ordered crystalline structure to a more glass-like amorphous state.”13 Again, there is no acknowledgment of Ovshinsky as the inventor of phase-change memory, much less any recognition that his cognitive computer had anticipated IBM’s work. But this “artificial neuron” further confirms the increasing importance of his fundamental discovery.14
Others are also working to revive and extend Ovshinsky’s work. One of the people who bid at the Ovshinsky Solar auction was the former ECD electrical engineer Guy Wicker. Spending down his savings, he bought a considerable amount of the equipment, which he used to set up a high-tech lab in the barn behind his house in Southfield, Michigan.15 Ovshinsky would have smiled, remembering the old barn he rented in 1946 to start Stanford Roberts. Wicker planned to conduct experiments following in Ovshinsky’s footsteps with a small team of other former ECD scientists, including Boil Pashmakov and Marshall Muller. Their hope was to resume the effort to make solar energy cheap enough to replace fossil fuels. In addition to the OS equipment, they received the OI patents and the right to use the name Ovshinsky Innovation from the Ovshinsky Foundation.16 An article in Crain’s Detroit Business from 2014 describes their solar program, proclaiming, “Though Ovshinsky and his companies may have died, the dream of affordable solar didn’t die with them.”17 Wicker and his colleagues hope to build on Ovshinsky’s later work to produce a more efficient and lower cost thin-film, flexible solar cell that can compete with the Chinese.
When Intel and Micron announced their 3D Xpoint memory chip in July 2015, Wicker and his colleagues recognized the structure they had built over twenty-five years earlier and knew, as was later acknowledged, that it must be based on Ovonic chalcogenide phase-change and threshold switches. They began to explore possibilities of developing the technology further in ways that would not be covered by the existing patents. (Micron acquired all the Ovonyx intellectual property.) Competing with the two technology giants is a formidable challenge, but at least one other chipmaker has been willing to fund their research. No matter how the story of the revived Ovshinsky Innovation develops, it is already clear that the important role Ovshinsky long ago envisioned for his amorphous devices will continue to grow in the information economy of the future.