Alumni’s Company Named Startup of the Month by Comstock’s Magazine
Comstock’s Magazine has named the Davis-based company Elve as its March startup of the month. Three-time mechanical and aerospace engineering alumni Diana Gamzina launched the company in 2020, following her research on millimeter wave technologies under Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Neville C. Luhmann Jr. and a stint as a staff scientist at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
Elve effectively enables fiber-quality connections over the air, leveraging space networks to boost connectivity. For instance, say you’re in the middle of nowhere. Your phone connects to a satellite, but that satellite still needs a station on the ground to complete the link. This is where Elve’s millimeter wave amplifiers come in. Think of them as high-powered Wi-Fi extenders but on a global scale.
These TWTAs — short for traveling wave tube amplifiers, a type of vacuum electronic device — boost signals over a wide range of millimeter wave frequencies with a dedicated power supply. Through advanced materials and manufacturing technologies, Elve found a way to produce these devices in large quantities for lower costs than ever before.
Gamzina points out that the real innovation of Elve’s technology is the cost. The actual amplifiers have been demonstrated before by herself and others. But making them at an affordable price is where Elve has truly excelled.
"There was a lot of disbelief," Gamzina says. "We’re only now, within the last year, getting to the point where even our own community that understands the technology is like, ‘Wow, you’ve solved a problem of the last three decades that everybody wanted to do but nobody could figure out how.'"
And in the future, she adds, the rise of the Internet of Things will only increase the value of advanced connectivity.
"So now items that are surrounding you are also hogging bandwidth," she says. "It’s not just the 'who' that wants to be connected, but your car is connected and your fridge is connected. That’s just in the household. Factories are going in that direction too. The more automation and augmented reality there is in our lives, the more connectivity is needed."
