Sciperio, Inc. Announces Third-Quarter Contracts and Receipt of Tibbetts Award.

Business Editors

STILLWATER, Okla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 4, 2001

Sciperio, Inc. today announced that it was the recipient of the 2001 Small Business Administration's (SBA) Tibbetts Award.

Dr. Kenneth Church, CEO of Sciperio, accepted the award on behalf of the company at a ceremony held at the Crystal Gateway Marriott in Washington, D.C., on October 2, 2001, and attended a Capital Hill reception honoring him and other recipients. Tibbetts Awards are made annually to those judged to exemplify the very best in Small Business Innovation Research ("SBIR") achievement. Mr. Dan Luton of the Oklahoma Center for the Advancement of Science and Technology (OCAST) nominated Sciperio for the award. According to Dr. Church: "The significance of the SBIR program cannot be overstated and the opportunities it has provided have been, and are still, critical. SBIRs have allowed Sciperio to move forward and secure larger funds with open Broad Agency Announcements (BAAs) and the commercial market."

The company also announced FY01 third-quarter contract awards, including a prime Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) contract for $4.6 million over three years under the agency's Meta-Materials program. Sciperio will lead a five-member consortium to develop advanced materials for RF wireless applications. Company President Dr. William Warren says the program "leverages well with the current corporate goals to develop novel designs, materials, and manufacturing processes for electrically large but physically small broadband antennas for a whole host of applications such as GPS, cellular phones, radios, PDAs, pagers, RF ID tags, wireless local area networks, and Bluetooth-enabled products, to name just a few."

OCAST awarded an Oklahoma State University (OSU)-Sciperio team a three-year project to create a Bluetooth developers' kit. Sciperio will provide cost-share funds and hardware expertise to the project. The program, leveraged with Sciperio's currently funded DARPA Mesoscopic Integrated Conformal Electronics (MICE) program will provide from OSU's expertise an essential piece of software for application of Sciperio's integrated antenna technology.

Sciperio was also selected for funding under the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) FY01 STTR solicitation to develop corrosion-prevention coatings. Dr. Robert Parkhill will serve as Principal Investigator on the project, and said that upon successful completion of the Phase I proof-of-concept project, the company will be poised to demonstrate the ability to protect specific metals from deteriorating and give longer lifetimes to machines and tools. Phase II funding will allow for further development of the coatings process and position Sciperio to move a commercially viable coatings system into the marketplace.

Sciperio is a future-minded advanced research-and-development firm specializing in engineering, lasers and photonics, computer science, EL/PS antennas, materials science, sensing, and biophysics. Technological advancements are spun into subsidiary companies or licensed out to manufacturers, distributors or marketing companies. Research funding comes primarily from federal programs and from the State of Oklahoma through its Oklahoma Center for the Advancement of Science and Technology (OCAST).