NASHUA – Do you remember the brouhaha that erupted when iPhone users were told some of their calls disappeared because they were the holding the phone wrong?

This “death grip” sounded like a joke to most of us, but it sounded like money to Paratek. The small tech firm in the Millyard Technology Park is on the cusp of explosive growth because it can help cell phones solve just that sort of problem.

Paratek makes tiny “tuners” that fit inside the sexiest of smartphone cases and improve the effectiveness of the phone’s antenna, to help it avoid dead spots, handle the growing amount of data that we want to use and minimize the whole family of “death grip” problems (wearing metal glasses can make some phones wonky).

The company uses its version of barium strontium titanate, a thin-film dielectric ceramic that changes capacitance as voltage changes, to tune antennas.

Other technologies can tune internal cell-phone antennas and other companies are chasing the market, but Paratek, thanks to a dozen years of expensive effort, appears to be in front of the pack.

“I’m sure there will be others, but for now, we stand alone,” said Thomas Lambalot, the company’s chief commercial officer.

Long history

Paratek was founded in 1998, and has long been an intriguing but unproven startup, struggling to turn interesting technology developed by Dr. Louise Sengupta into a marketable device.

Lambalot estimates that over the years, as much as $135 million in invested capital has gone into the firm from various private investors. Notable is Polaris Venture Partners, which combined the company with Nashua-based Signal Technology, hence the Technology Park location.

Paratek rolled out its core product, called ParaStak, in 2002, and by October 2006, The Telegraph was writing about how the company was on the verge of big business, which didn’t pan out.

Five years later, it finally has, with the recent sale to a big-name phone company in the Asian market that uses Paratek’s technology to help its high-end phone handle the data loads and flexibility demanded in the mobile-computing world.

Paratek says that thanks to the delivery – the manufacturer will be announced later this summer – it should sell RAFT (radio antenna frequency tuner) systems in 5 million handsets this year, getting around $1.50 to $2 per phone.

The company plans to sell into 20 times that many phones in 2012, when its next-generation technology launches. (Despite my iPhone example, by the way, Apple isn’t a prospective customer, although plenty of other carriers are.)

There’s nothing like customer orders to validate a technical system, which helps explain why technical magazine Red Herring put Paratek on its list of top Top 100 private companies in North America and the respected Prismark Wireless Technology Report raved about Paratek in its June quarterly issue.

Booming market

Paratek’s market is being driven by the increase in cell phones and wireless tablet computers, the huge amount of videos and data being pumped over the broadcast spectrum via 3G, 4G and other acronym-soup technologies, the slicing and dicing of the broadcast spectrum to handle it all and the different ways that people use smart phones for mobile Internet and gaming.

We don’t just hold phones against our ears anymore, but move them, shake them and grab them with both hands at once, all of which can interfere with reception, especially in the 700 megahertz band used by Verizon’s LTE service.

“At lower frequencies, our bodies muck up the signal more,” said Gregory Mendolia, senior vice president of mobile wireless products for Paratek.

All this leads to a tightening of standards by phone makers struggling to fit the technology for this changing market inside sleek cases. One part of meeting these standards is to tune internal antennas.

Internal antennas are hard-wired in the factory to handle certain types of signals and “use cases,” the industry term for ways in which people hold their phone.

Paratek’s RAFT, a 3- by 5-millimeter device that looks like a computer chip, allows antennas to be tuned in very short time, so companies can cope with last-minute changes in design or market. Its next product, called AIMM, will change antenna tuning in real time, adjusting if, say, you start wearing metal glasses that affect the signal.

The key is not just making and using the dielectric materials – the core of the work that’s done in Nashua – but developing associated hardware and software so the tuning can be integrated with phones.

“It’s one thing to have the engineering. The other stuff is needed to give a turnkey solution,” Mendolia said.

Paratek says it has developed scores of patents, including nine that it considers essential or agnostic (meaning they apply to other tuning technologies), which gives it an income stream from intellectual property licensing, as well as backup to the hardware sales.

Perhaps most important, Paratek thinks this accumulated research gives it the lead necessary in a tech industry likely to draw plenty of competition.

“We’ve got a 11?2- to two-year gap, and we’ve got to keep that gap,” Mendolia said.

David Brooks can be reached at 594-5831 or dbrooks@nashuatelegraph.com.

Newsletter