If They Get It, They Will Come.

Most of the companies doing deals and making news in the technology sector lack gladiators, Afflecks and Damons. In fact, most of them possess downright mundane technology.

They do, however, retain the techie proclivity to blaze new language trails.

Consider some of the players that got funded in the past two weeks. One develops photonic energy for the treatment of cardiovascular diseases. Another said it "discovers new medicines by using proprietary knowledge of proteins and chemistry to provide fundamental information on protein structure and function on a genome-wide scale." Huh?

Another develops components for optical amplifier systems. One, more simply, said it is "a resource planning infrastructure provider."

One of the most recent examples locally is Rockwell Scientific, the spinoff from Rockwell International focused on research and development and commercialization of mostly aerospace-related technologies. It announced a few weeks ago that it had received a $6.4 million contract from the U.S. Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, which is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The objective of the program, according to Rockwell, "is the development of transistors based on new types of compound semiconductors that employ antimony as a primary constituent."

It gets worse. "These new antimonide-based compound semi-conductors have superior electronic properties and lower turn-on voltages compared to present-day semiconductor materials from silicon, gallium arsenide and indium phosphide."

In plain English, what Rockwell will be developing will amplify digital signals without adding extra noise and without consuming more power, according to Bobby Barar, whose official title is Manager of Advanced Ill-V Devices. (The Roman numerals refer to families on the periodic table of elements.)