Holophotonics Equipamentos Ópticos e Eletrônicos Ltda.
Sensor that won’t go off with small animals is innovating product
optics company from the interior of São Paulo has developed

A sensor of movements about as big as a computer mouse able to differentiate human beings from small animals — that’s the innovating product Holophotonics, a small company from São Carlos, in the interior of the State of São Paulo, plans to launch in the market in the first semester of 2008. With this pet immune sensor, Holophotonics wants to get 85 percent of Brazil’s potential market in this category of products (the equivalent of 200,000 units per year, according to the company’s figures) and, three years after starting its operations, become the country’s sales leader. Only pet immune sensors imported from Asia are available in Brazil today.

Like other São Carlos companies — the most famous of them being Opto —, Holophotonics masters optics. The company’s name gives the clue: “holo” from holograms, plus “photonics”, the area of Physics that studies possible applications of light powers — lasers, for instance, are a photonics subject (the company’s full name is Holophotonics Equipamentos Ópticos e Eletrônicos, or Holophotonics Optical and Electronic Equipment). In the case of the new pet immune sensor, it’s the Fresnel lenses the company has developed for that specific aim that enables the equipment to ignore the presence of pets – but not people.

The entire development of the sensor has been funded by the Programa Inovação Tecnológica em Pequenas Empresas (Technological Innovation in Small Businesses Program, PIPE), the program of the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (State of São Paulo Research Foundation, Fapesp) that gives support to innovating small businesses. This successful project in particular, which began in 2003, resulted in a patent Holophotonics deposited in May of 2007. Now the company wants further support for its sensor from PIPE: it has signed up for the recent call for projects on the program’s Phase III, which funds the commercialization of products or prototypes that have been developed with the Foundation’s resources. The names of the chosen companies are expected to be announced by the end of October.

If its new project is approved, Holophotonics is going to improve its product: the plan is to develop a more efficient lens. With the current technology, the sensor won’t go off with animals weighting up to 30 kg (66 lbs.); but the company wants its new lens to allow animals with 36 kg (79 lbs.) or more not set off the alarm. If the project is not approved though, the plans for launching the current sensor will be kept: launching will take place in the first semester of 2008.

Modest headquarters

Holophotonics’ headquarters are still modest. The company operates in a 350-sq. meter (37,700 sq. ft) rented building, where five people work – its four partners and a trainee. “Our company is basically a R&D department in which the projects for our products are made,” explains Giuseppe Cirino, one of the partners. “Production proper is outsourced because Holophotonics is not big enough to have a manufacturing plant.” Revenues are also modest: in 2006, they were about US$ 26,000. For 2007 a 30 percent increase is expected.

The market seen by an expert

In Brazil, the electronic security market involves US$ 555 million and grows by 12 percent each year. According to figures from the Brazilian Association of Electronic Security System Companies (Abese, in the Portuguese language acronym), there are 8,000 companies operating in this area in Brazil. They generate 80,000 direct and 800,000 indirect jobs. “It’s a very large market for sensor manufacturers,” says Selma Migliori, Abese’s president. “The trend is for its growth to continue. Especially if you take into account that only 7 percent of Brazil’s homes have some system of electronic protection.”

According to Migliori, it is estimated that there are 430,000 properties protected by monitored alarm systems in the country. “Depending on the property’s size, of the protected area, if it has a system of perimetral protection – which is infrared barriers that protect the perimeter of the monitored area –, each of these systems may require from ten to 100 sensors,” she says. “Protection systems include alarms, closed circuit TVs, access control systems, automatic doors and gates, fire combat equipment, metal and explosive detectors, rotating doors, identification devices through biometrics, and vehicle and person’s trackers.”

Despite all these options, Holophotonics’ pet immune sensors are an important innovation. “False alarms, set off accidentally by pets, causes a lot of trouble and are undesirable,” says Migliori. “Besides, pet immune sensors ensure more precision to the system of intrusion detection and reduce the chances of technical problems and fraud in the system.”

Holophotonics’ Cirino explains his view of the importance of a good sensor: “A cat, for instance, may set off a security structure and divert the resources from a real emergency in which human lives are at risk.”

The product’s relevance

It’s the sensor’s lenses Holophotonics has developed that are going to reduce the incidence of such false alarms. Inside it the company has embedded an optical filter capable of distinguishing small animals from human beings. Imported conventional pet immune sensors operate electronically — in other words, they distinguish big from small through signal processing circuits, such as micro-controllers and micro-processors. Cirino explains the difference. “With the special lens we’ve developed, the information doesn’t have to be electronically processed,” he says. “The lens itself does much of the job, still in the realm of optics, so the information it delivers to the electronic circuit is already well processed. This way the circuit’s complexity is substantially reduced. On the other hand, the cost for producing the special lens is the same as a conventional one because it’s nothing more than a change in its design, in its geometry. It’s as if optics made the job of electronics a lot easier.”

The material

Holophotonics’ sensor senses heat – i.e., it detects the heat the body produces. The lenses catch the heat, concentrate it and increase its intensity to the point it is detectable to an internal sensor in the device that turns the heat’s radiation into electric signals. It’s the electric signals that set off the alarm.

Other companies have tried to develop similar products but failed, according to one of Holophotonics’ owners. Cirino explains that the biggest difficulty is to come to the material of which the lens is made, because it must have the property of detecting just the radiations with wave length compatible with the heat produced by a person, not by small animals.

According to Cirino, Brazilian distributors sell pet immune sensors made in Asia only because up to now no domestic companies manufactured good quality lenses. “Our work from now on is to convince these distributors that there’s no need to import anymore. We’re going to show them the advantages, which are mostly the lack of bureaucracy and import expenses, which increase costs.”

Model in computer

Fresnel lenses, which Holophotonics uses, have been known since the beginning of the 19th Century. Today, the first step for manufacturing them is the creation of a computer model. Then the model is used to create a steel mold, a kind of matrix, which will be used for the large scale production of the lenses. That’s no easy task. The lenses’ internal geometry – the format – has nuances that need to be transferred to the steel matrix. In this stage comes LaserTools, a São Paulo company that is a PIPE’s client as well. LaserTools has developed a high precision matrix engraving system using laser beams. It took Holophotonics’ computer model two years to be reproduced in the steel matrix – and it’s the computer project the object of the patent required from the National Institute of Intellectual Property (Instituto Nacional da Propriedade Industrial, INPI).

History of a sensor

The history of the pet immune alarm system began in 2002, when Cirino finished his PhD in optics at the University of São Paulo’s Escola Politécnica (Politechnical School, Poli-USP). That same year he applied for funding from PIPE to develop a project in the area of electronic security at PPA, a company headquartered in Garça, also in the interior of the State of São Paulo. The project “Desenvolvimento de novos sensores infravermelhos de detecção de movimento para aplicações em segurança doméstica e corporativa” (Development of new infrared sensors of movement detection for applications in domestic and corporate security), worth approximately US$ 85,000, was approved in January of 2003.

Phase I was carried out at PPA, and demonstrated — that’s the aim of this stage of the program — the project’s technical viability. “The work was done with the support of Poli’s Laboratory of Integrated Systems and outsourcing to other knowledge-based companies, of which LaserTools was the most important,” recalls Cirino. “In the transition for Phase two there came the opportunity of opening my own company and supply services for PPA.”

For Cirino, the experience in coordinating the project’s Phase I showed him that he was capable of having a business of his own, producing technology in Brazil and living of it. “That’s how Holophotonics was born in April of 2005,” he explains. “My partner Robson Barcellos, who is an engineer, and I created the company, headquartered at São Carlos’ ParqTec incubator. Shortly after we got capital from new partners, so we left the incubator just four months after the company had been created.”

PIPE was essential for the company’s creation because it funded the project that started everything. “Holophotonics’ structure and the chances for new business were possible only thanks to the revenues the pet immune sensor’s project generated,” recognizes Cirino. “Without PIPE there’d be no project and therefore no Holophotonics.”

Another line of R&D

The sensor project is not the company’s only one funded by PIPE. There’s another, already in Phase II, of approximately US$ 66,000, for the development of a device called optical correlator. This product is used for verifying whether certain characteristics of an image – the image of a production line of pills packet in cartons, for instance – are altered compared to a model. “With the correlator monitoring the conveyor belt in which the cartons pass, it’s possible to detect those in which there are pills lacking,” explains Cirino. “Once the carton that doesn’t meet the specification has been detected, the correlator sends an electronic command [to a robot’s arm, for instance], and a decision is taken [for example, removing the carton from the conveyor belt].”

The innovating aspect of this device is its low cost. There are similar products in the market, but they are based on the so-called “machine vision”: they capture the image with a video camera and process it electronically with a computer. “In general, that’s an expensive process in terms of equipment as well as in computer effort,” Cirino says. “The device we have proposed processes the image strictly optically. That means low cost and swiftness, since the whole system operates in light speed.”