NORDTECH’s Partnership Showcase: Q&A with Austin Hickman

Image: NORDTECH Partnership Showcase: Austin Hickman, Co-Founder and CEO of Soctera

Author: Sawyer Simmons

Austin Hickman co-founded Soctera in 2019 while he was still a doctoral student at Cornell University. Now the Ithaca-based startup is an industry partner at the Northeast Regional Defense Technology Hub (NORDTECH), contributing to NORDTECH’s efforts to onshore microelectronics development for crucial Department of Defense missions.

Soctera is developing a power amplifier built with nitride semiconductors to achieve greater energy density, higher efficiency, and lower operating temperatures compared to the industry standard.

Last May, Soctera was awarded a $1 million Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II grant to develop its nitride semiconductor technology. In September, the Department of Defense selected a NORDTECH project that Soctera is part of – Nitride RF Next-Generation Technology (NITRIDER) – for an expected total of $8.4 million in funding. Partners in the Cornell-led NITRIDER project also include Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Northrup Grumman, Teledyne Scientific & Imaging LLC, Crystal IS Inc., and Qorvo Texas, LLC.

Q: Your education is in engineering. When did you begin thinking about starting a company?

Austin Hickman: My entrepreneurial journey really got started halfway through grad school. The third year of my Ph.D. program, I was working in the lab of Debdeep Jena and Grace Xing [both are professors of electrical and computer engineering and of materials science and engineering at Cornell], and I participated in a Cornell commercialization program. Through that process, I realized there was a strong product-market fit for my idea. That’s what kicked things off.

Q: What challenges did you face early on?

Austin Hickman: The first challenge was how am I going to pay myself? How am I going to have health insurance? It actually worked out well that I was still a student and focused on getting my degree. On the side, I was putting things in place so that once I graduated I could jump into the company, be paid, and not have to worry about a lot of the basic stuff because I was able to lay the groundwork while I was still in school.

Q: How have your ideas evolved from your initial vision?

Austin Hickman: At the beginning I thought we would be commercializing towards 6G. But after talking to people in the industry, I realized 6G is still very far off, even today. This was the first shift in my thought process. There aren't yet relevant applications for 6G, and you're probably going to struggle to have success developing a product like that. What I learned instead is that the power amplifiers that are used for wireless communication today face a lot of performance and thermal management issues because of the heat they generate. We looked at what we were developing and said, Hey, we actually think we have a very strong thermal play here. That’s when we pivoted from far out technologies – essentially building for something that really didn't exist yet – to addressing a known issue that exists today.

Q: Starting a company from the ground up is notoriously difficult. What was the incubation process like for Soctera?

Austin Hickman: The Praxis Center for Venture Development at Cornell University has been awesome for us. Being in Praxis has given us access to the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility (CNF). We still do R&D and short loop experiments at CNF that are really helpful for our product development. We aren't actually doing production at CNF, but we're doing R&D, which helps us and our production partners.

As an incubator, Praxis is helping us transition the technology from proven in-lab performance to making it work with current production methods and scaling up for complex, real-world applications. “From lab to fab” is the common expression. We need to work in a facility like CNF because, especially with semiconductors, it's not like you can buy a few pieces of equipment and do it yourself, right? The R&D requires these $100 million facilities. There are maybe only five to 10 places in the U.S. that could feasibly do this for us, aside from Cornell.

Q: What was the funding process like?

Austin Hickman: We have done well in terms of non-dilutive grants — National Science Foundation, Air Force, Army, the Defense Business Accelerator, Activate. I really love Activate. And of course, we are part of NITRIDER, one of the Cornell-led awards that received CHIPS Act funding through NORDTECH. Overall, we've really benefited from the innovation ecosystem here at Cornell.

Q: What does Cornell do differently for startups?

Austin Hickman: The university has been ramping up its efforts to help entrepreneurs take those first few steps. You have to convince people to start a company. Not everybody just automatically wants to do it, and it’s a scary thing. Cornell has done a good job of helping science entrepreneurs through the incubation process. Ultimately, it comes back to having all that support in place, so you can convince students to bring the technologies they’ve been working on in the lab and take things to the next stage, to get them out into the world and make a difference.