Rollwagen Expects to Find Himself in Chips Again With Young Firm : Computers: Ex-Cray chief accepted chairmanship of Chatsworth-based PMT because he sees it poised to make a breakthrough.
It’s a long way from heading supercomputer giant Cray Research. But for John Rollwagen, working for Chatsworth-based Plasma & Materials Technologies Inc.--a small technology company often confused with a blood bank--is like deja vu .
“I absolutely fell in love with it,” says Rollwagen, who was named PMT’s chairman last month. “It reminded me so much of Cray in the middle ‘70s I could hardly stand it.”
Although the local Yellow Pages mistakenly lists it as a blood products center, Plasma & Materials Technologies is actually a manufacturer of million-dollar machines used to etch materials on the surface of computer chips.
Rollwagen, 53, is best known as the former chief executive of Cray, where in 12 years he presided over the firm’s growth into an $800-million-a-year supercomputing powerhouse. Last year, he was nominated by President Clinton as deputy secretary of commerce, but he left the post before being confirmed by the Senate.
Like the young Cray Research, he says, PMT is a company with a unique technology poised to make a breakthrough. In Greg Campbell, 34, one of the firm’s co-founders, it has a boyish chief executive the same age as Rollwagen when he started at Cray.
“This is the year for PMT,” Rollwagen says.
Some industry analysts are dubious. They wonder if Rollwagen--who will continue to live in Minnesota while working only part time at PMT--can give the company a credibility boost in a very tough market and whether the Cray magic can work in another setting.
A year ago, Rollwagen was on a completely different track.
After a long stint at Minneapolis-based Cray, he was headed for the No. 2 job at the Commerce Department. It was, he thought, “an opportunity to make a broader contribution and pay something back for what I had received myself at Cray.”
But disillusionment quickly set in.
He figured that Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown “could take care of the politics and I could take care of the business, so to speak, of the Commerce Department,” Rollwagen recalls. “Well, that was naive. I wasn’t as much a politician as he. I have nothing against politicians, but I’m not one.”
When he resigned in May, Rollwagen considered seeking a top position at a company of Cray’s stature. Instead, he decided to pursue a different type of challenge and lend his expertise to smaller firms. Rollwagen started working as an adviser to St. Paul Venture Capital, a financial group that had invested in PMT. St. Paul publicized his arrival in its newsletter, and that made interesting reading for Campbell.
With a Ph.D in plasma physics from UCLA, Campbell founded PMT in 1990 with one of his professors, Robert Conn. They developed a technology for producing gaseous plasmas, or ionized gases that, when stripped of their electrons, are highly reactive.
Specifically, PMT’s technology makes a plasma out of chlorine gas. In turn, semiconductor manufacturers use plasmas to engrave patterns of electrical circuits onto the surface of their memory chips. PMT says its product can process more chips per hour than the competition’s products.
Five large companies--including Applied Materials Inc. in Santa Clara, Calif., and Lam Research Corp. in Fremont, Calif.--command 60% of the $1-billion-a-year worldwide market for plasma-etch machinery. PMT is a pipsqueak with about a 1% market share.
G. Dan Hutcheson, president of VLSI Research in San Jose, says credibility is a key issue for any company trying to break into the plasma-etch market: “People want to know if they order 100 of these machines, can the company build them? Will they go out of business?”
Privately held PMT, which employs 60 people and sells machines under the names Pinnacle and Apex, predicts revenue of $11 million for the year ending Feb. 28.
