NASHUA – Infrared cameras are in the news at the moment, since they were used to spot Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev hiding in a sailboat. But they’re old hat at Nashua firm QmagiQ, which has been designing and making the innards of high-end detectors for a decade.

The tiny firm, founded by six former Lockheed Sanders engineers, received an innovation award Friday that drew Gov. Maggie Hassan for a tour.

QmagiQ (pronounced “cue-magic”) makes focal-plane arrays for infrared systems, or what might be considered the digital equivalent of camera film. These images reveal heat given off by a body or, in some cases, of gases, depending on quantum-level effects of the chips that are hand assembled to achieve incredibly high resolution.

The firm’s chips are used in everything from the Landsat 8 satellite launched in February to cameras made by the near-neighbor Flir, a company that has built a huge business on infrared cameras. A Flir camera captured the now famous infrared image of Tsarnaev hiding in a boat, although it isn’t known whether that camera used a QmagiQ chip.

QmagiQ has been expanding from a technology called QWIP, or quantium-well infrared photodetector, to SLS, or layer superlattice, to maintain its edge.

“We’re one of the leading, if not the leading company, on SLS,” said Axel Reisinger, chief technology officer and one of the founders.

A measure of QmagiQ’s size is that it has six founders and just two other full-time employees. It sells hundreds of chips each year, and a smaller number of cameras and other systems – figures so small that final chip wiring is done by hand under high-powered microscopes rather than by automated systems, as is done by the Intels of the world.

The fact that such a tiny firm can compete with companies such as Raytheon in a specialized market drew Hassan and former U.S. Rep. Paul Hodes to the offices on Friday. Hodes’ nonprofit Economic Innovation Institute, a policy research and advocacy organization, gave QmagiQ its first Excellence in Innovation Award.

During the presentation, Hodes noted that company CEO Mani Sundaram was born in India, came to the U.S. to get advanced college degrees, stayed to work for high-tech firms and finally joined with other engineers to create a new company.

“This is a quintessential American success story for the 21st century,” Hodes said.

“It’s a great New Hampshire, and American, story,” Hassan added later.

It’s also a great Nashua-area story. This area is full of high-tech firms started by engineers who came to Nashua after being hired by Sanders Associates or its subsequent iterations, now BAE Systems, and who eventually left the company but stayed in the area.

As Reisinger explained, then-Lockheed Sanders didn’t want to use chip technology that the engineers had developed for the commercial market, so they licensed the intellectual property back and eventually started QmagiQ.

(The Q stands for “quantum,” and the odd spelling of “magic” was required because somebody else owned the name with normal spelling.)

Since then, company officials said, it has thrived on a mixture of commercial customers such as
Flir, government customers such as NASA, and specialized research and development contracts. The R&D work, Sundaram said, has led to upcoming commercial products that can spot otherwise invisible leaks of Freon from refrigerators or sulfur hexafluoride from electric transformers – a potentially huge market.

Sundaram said QmagiQ has used no venture-capital funding, but has thrived strictly on income and founders’ money.

QmagiQ moved a half-dozen years ago from Spit Brook Road to the end unit of an office complex on Cotton Road, right behind Hesser College’s Amherst Street buildings. It has 8,500 square feet, about one-third of which is light manufacturing.

The facility holds the usual tech-firm mix of cubicles, whiteboards and computers galore, plus a large clean room, with positive air pressure that constantly blows out so dust can’t enter, for manufacturing. The details on QmagiQ’s chips are so tiny – measured in the millionths of a meter – that even small dust particles can damage them.

QmagiQ has stayed in Nashua because its founders mostly live here and because it doesn’t need Boston-area financing or access to large numbers of Boston-area engineers for its employee roll, which are the usual items that draw New Hampshire tech firms south.

Sundaram noted that this is a good location because it’s part of what he called an infrared corridor that has built up along the Merrimack River Valley, from Manchester into Massachusetts, featuring a good number of suppliers and customers for infrared-detection industry. He said this and Santa Barbara, Calif., are the two infrared-industry hot spots in the country.

David Brooks can be reached at 594-6531 or dbrooks@nashua
telegraph.com. Also, follow Brooks on Twitter @Telegraph_DaveB.