Expertise

As you probably know, strategy “is a general plan to achieve one or more long-term or overall goals under conditions of uncertainty” and within resources available. Technology strategy, then, is a focus on the implementation aspects, where the complexity, opportunity, or uncertainty is technological—which these days is often the case.

Determining how best to leverage a new or existing technology, make investments or engage in development, and create staged roadmaps for all these is critical to the successful achievement of goals. While focusing on technology, it also needs to be considered in conjunction with usage and business needs and goals.
—-(This last sentence can link to the Frameworks project.)

Nearly every project we have worked on has had an explicit or implicit component of technology strategy. While the technologies at hand have been widely varied—smart toys, CAD tools and methods, internet infrastructure, machine learning, wearables, education systems, multi-generational computing platform planning, supply chains, sustainability—we’ve developed common techniques for dealing with multi-disciplinary systems. Likewise, these methods scale from the smallest start-ups to mature companies.

This area of expertise encompasses everything from semiconductor device physics and fabrication to high performance computing, and machine intelligence.

The digital transformation was one of the most significant drivers of change and productivity in the 20th century, and it continues today. Understanding and applying appropriate advances in the field is essential in nearly every domain.

Anaphasic spans building electrochemical interfaces on silicon to design of custom computing platforms to massive data analytics, modeling, and visualization.

With the advent of new technologies (many from semiconductors & computing) and the escalating rate of understanding, biology has been increasingly transformed into a field subject to more deliberate engineering. From acellular processes in a vat to full ecosystems, we grow more capable of integrating with and being inspired by living systems.

While electricity and electronics transformed our world in the 20th century, synthetic biology is poised to revolutionize our planet, meeting new challenges in the 21st and onward: climate change, food supply, biodiversity, and much more. One of the most fundamental changes to moving our manufacturing base from extractive/subtractive processes to constructive ones, starting at the molecular level: for example, growing feedstocks for plastics from bacteria or algae instead of fossil fuels, and avoiding waste products from refining and manufacture.

Anaphasic was motivated by a long-running observation and vision: designing and building microprocessors is arguably one of the most complex engineering tasks humans have ever accomplished, and continues to be. Long ago, we wondered what fields would eventually require such levels of sophistication and scale. From the beginning of the Human Genome Project, we had a likely target: understanding and engineering biological components and systems, applying what we knew from one maturing field into a new emerging one.

Molecular information systems—the space where atoms and bits connect—is one of the essential characteristics of life. The structure and composition of molecules not only determines their physical properties and how they interact, but can also encode and communicate information about processes and behaviors well beyond these local effects. Some molecules in particular—the biopolymers at the core of genomics—directly bridge the worlds of matter and information, translating the coding sequencing of one into the functional structure of another.

Biological systems have evolved complex languages and metabolisms with many layers and scales of intertwined chemical and information signals—the meaning within life.  As a consequence, detecting, analyzing, and acting on meaningful information in molecular systems is fundamental to many human concerns with high economic impact.
Whether molecular diagnostics for pregnancy and cancer or understanding which genes control important characteristics of food crops or designing new organisms to digest plastic waste or capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, molecular information plays a central role.

Anaphasic was born out of closing the loop between digital and molecular information. Our experience in making chemical actuation and sensing on silicon combined with analytics of the information in the digital regime allowed us to fully connect these two worlds, and is a primary focus.

See our related projects (links), and come back soon for a deeper perspective into this topic.