PACE Licensing and Security Supports MATLAB Projects
An increasing number of universities are designing graduate programs centered around entrepreneurship in addition to publishing their work. This bridge from academia to industry is particularly interesting to PACE Anti-Piracy because PACE has worked with companies in transitioning software to commercial products for nearly four decades. With extensive industry knowledge, PACE brings engineering support and solutions to help companies such as Laser Thermal license their software and protect their IP before they sell it.
Who is Laser Thermal?
Laser Thermal provides accessible thermal measurements of materials, focusing on thin-film thermal conductivity. Using optical technologies, they provide simple, accurate, and rapid measurements of thermal properties, leading to increased customer knowledge of material properties.
Making Measurements Easier
Laser Thermal’s flagship product, Steady-State Thermoreflectance in Fiber Optics (SSTR-F), offers customers in industry and academia a reliable way to measure thermal properties of materials. The measurement technique uses two lasers: a pump laser that locally heats a sample, and a probe laser that measures the temperature rise at the same location. By understanding the temperature rise, they can determine the thermal properties of multi-layer systems at the nanometer scale. The ability to focus lasers down to small spots allows for high spatial resolution.
SSTR-F offers accurate and repeatable thermal conductivity measurements and thermal resistance measurements for a range of materials and thin films. It offers an automated, non-contact approach to measuring thin films–a solution which revolutionizes the speed and accuracy of measuring thermal properties. This offers a new capability for metrology of thermal properties, particularly to customers in the semiconductor industry.
Hardware Needs Software
The SSTR-F hardware is paired with software developed in-house by Laser Thermal. It was originally developed in LabView, and later converted to MATLAB for computational efficiency. On the interplay between hardware and software, Vice President of Product Development, Dr. Hans Olson, explains that, "With SSTR-F, we acquire data with hardware components driven by the overarching software protocols. After that data is acquired, there's another whole piece of software that takes those data inputs and analyzes them to produce results."
In order to protect the software parts of their product, the team at Laser Thermal looked to licensing to prevent future piracy.
High-Value Software Needs Licensing
Laser Thermal evaluated several different licensing solutions prior to having an introductory call with the PACE Engineering team. “When we learned about the extra security capabilities that PACE had to offer, it gave us all the more reason to choose PACE’s Licensing Platform,” explains Dr. Olson. When asked why the alternatives weren’t a good fit, Hans responded “The alternative solution seemed promising at first, but ultimately PACE’s experience and reliability won our team over.”
Importance of Security
When asked what role the added security features played in Laser Thermal choosing PACE, Hans replied, “We would like to think that what we are doing is complicated to the point that it would take another organization an appreciable amount of time to catch up. To perform the necessary R&D, understand what fiber components to put together, how to facilitate the delivery, the analysis for the solution of a heat diffusion equation, and to combine all of the math–it would take a long time to figure out, unless someone had access to our code.”
Monetizing MATLAB Projects
PACE Anti-Piracy brings nearly 40 years of experience to the software licensing and application protection space. While PACE has been working for years with software companies that leverage MATLAB, in 2022, PACE became the first licensing platform to enter the MathWorks Connections Program and offer an out-of-the-box solution to software developers that use MATLAB.
When Dr. Olson sought out a solution for the company’s MATLAB project, experience and level of protection were the defining factors. “We worked really hard for this product. I wasn’t going to take a risk.”
Read more about how Laser Thermal is disrupting the Test and Measurement Industry.
For more on how PACE Anti-Piracy can support your licensing and application security needs, contact us.
