Tiny switch makes big impact on medical tools

A NEW FRONTIER: Coto Technology’s groundbreaking, miniaturized reed switch is creating new markets.  Pictured above at the company’s North Kingstown headquarters are Odair Dafonseca, left, a design engineer,  and Roger Lavalle, a senior test engineer. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY
A NEW FRONTIER: Coto Technology’s groundbreaking, miniaturized reed switch is creating new markets. Pictured above at the company’s North Kingstown headquarters are Odair Dafonseca, left, a design engineer, and Roger Lavalle, a senior test engineer. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY

Given that the computing power that once required a warehouse of processing units can now be put into smartphones, it’s difficult to believe that competition to miniaturize mechanical electronic components is still on. But it is.
A case in point is the tiny, new reed switch from North Kingstown-based Coto Technology Inc. A single cubic millimeter in size and known as the RedRock, the switch has a wide variety of applications (medical prominent among them) and represents a giant step forward for Coto.
The company’s president, Jeff Bentley, said the innovation comes at a critical time.
“Coto’s primary product for the last 40 years has been the reed relay, and this is a very old technology that goes back into the early 1940s,” Bentley said. “What’s happened over the last 20 to 30 years is some of the new switching technologies, including semiconductor-based relays, have encroached on the applications.”
What that has meant, Bentley said, is that “the marketplace is shrinking, the company’s customer base is shrinking, and ultimately the company is shrinking.”
That said, the average modern home still has anywhere from 10 to 20 reed switches in it, Bentley said, with the devices at work in food processors, home appliances and, particularly, home-security systems.
Reed switches are metallic switches that are made to close when a magnet is presented. When the door of a home with a security system closes, for instance, a magnet that the security company has installed triggers the switch.
Certainly, Coto’s tiny new Red-Rock is keeping the company competitive in its traditional markets. But it is creating new markets as well.
The RedRock switch likely will be used in small, digestible cameras that can be encased in a pill, to conduct colonoscopies. Other medical uses are a new generation of smaller mounted insulin injectors for diabetics, the robotics for artificial limbs, and, inevitably, products that no one at Coto has thought of yet.
With the introduction of the Red-Rock switch, “we knew we were going to have new applications coming out of the woodwork that we hadn’t even thought about,” Bentley said. “It behooved us to get it out there early and sample it, and what we discovered was a huge diversity of applications. But the medical world has become probably the most dominant one.”
Miniaturized hearing aids are another medical application for the RedRock switch. “What they’re trying to do with the hearing aid is go from being obvious in the ear to down in the ear canal,” Bentley said. “They have to miniaturize it even further, and this switch is a perfect match for that. They have tools that you hold up next to your ear, and the reed switch sitting in your ear will switch the device just by having proximity between the switch and the magnet.”
The company is already delivering small lots of RedRock switches in the tens to several hundreds in number to companies working on their own prototypes.
Coto intends to have the Red-Rock in full production by July or August. “My guess is that this is going to be the most dynamic and rapidly grown product that the company has had in many, many years,” Bentley said. “Back during the technology boom of the late 1990s we had a lot of products that went crazy at the time, but I think that this one has the possibility of just developing tremendous sales very quickly.”
Coto employs 140 people, 125 of them in Mexicali, Mexico, at the company’s factory and the rest in North Kingstown at its corporate headquarters.
And although it is indeed poised to benefit from a product that it believes to be the smallest electro-mechanical switch in the world, the company cannot afford to do so at the expense of its traditional product lines. The shrinking in Coto’s size that Bentley describes is not so much going over a cliff than coasting down a gentle slope.
“Part of the thing that you have to manage is that we have this core business that does this old technology that there is still significant demand in the world for,” Bentley said. “And that is the part of the business that feeds our ability to develop new technology. People want to work on the new technology, but we have to make sure we’re managing the old technology as we need to.”
So, while the company’s employees are so upbeat about the RedRock switch that they would like to be working on it full time, a balance has needed to be established between past, present and future technologies at Coto, Bentley said.
“We’re educating people, sending them to school, developing their skills, expanding their skills, and that’s exciting for employees, especially of a small company,” he said.
What made the new switch possible was a manufacturing change. Traditional reed switches, enclosed in glass, had a minimum size they could attain before the heat required to seal the glass would damage the conducting surfaces of the switch.
For the RedRock switch, Coto took a page from the computing world’s playbook. It produces the switch using lithographic semiconductor fabrication methods. The result is a switch that has both high sensitivity and high retract forces built into it and is not prone to sticking, as some earlier miniaturized switches tended to do.
And although the manufacturing technology is borrowed from semiconductors, the RedRock switch is an electro-mechanical switch with a small structure that physically moves.
The RedRock switch has been chosen by Electronic Products as Product of the Year for 2014, and interest in the switch has been strong, demanding quick reaction.
“We try to respond to every inquiry either within the same day or within 24 hours,” Bentley said. •

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