Profile
Sula Technologies was founded by Darwin Thusius in 1982. Thusius holds a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from Antioch College and a Ph.D. in chemistry from Stanford University. His research director at Stanford, Professor Henry Taube, received the Nobel Prize for his contributions to the understanding of inorganic reaction mechanisms.
Following graduate school, Dr. Thusius spent two years as a National Science Foundation Fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute for Physical Chemistry in Goettingen, Germany where he used innovative instrumentation to study the kinetics of very fast reactions in solution. These techniques, known as Chemical Relaxation Methods, were developed by Professor Manfred Eigen, Thusius’ director at the MPI, who was recognized for his achievements in 1967 with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
That same year Thusius moved to Paris, France where he had received a fellowship from the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) to introduce chemical relaxation methods to researchers studying the dynamics of biological processes such as protein folding and enzyme-ligand binding. In 1970 he was offered a tenured position in the CNRS and continued his research at the University of Paris.
With his interests evolving more in the direction of electronic instrument design - as opposed to biochemical laboratory manipulations - Thusius requested a leave of absence from the CNRS in 1980 with the goal of developing a tool for digital recording and analysis of fast chemical reactions and with the hope of establishing a small business for its commercialization. This two-year sabbatical followed by eighteen months doing semiconductor research at the Laboratoire de Physiques des Solides led to the creation of a small enterprise devoted to the early commercialization of Deep Level Transient Spectroscopy (DLTS) - a cousin to Eigen’s chemical relaxation techniques - which measures electron mobility in solids rather than molecular dynamics in solution. In 1982 Thusius left his tenured CNRS position in order to devote full time to Sula Technologies. One of Thusius’ first customers was D.V. Lang of Bell Laboratories, credited with the original development of the DLTS method. The technique has since become a unique and widely accepted tool for the detection and characterization of defects in semiconductors materials.
In 1985 Thusius relocated to Silicon Valley where conditions
for maintaining his hi-tech venture were considerably more favorable
than in Paris. This was followed eight years later by a move to Ashland,
Oregon where Sula Technologies is now located and enjoys a virtual monopoly
of the domestic DLTS market as well as a prominent position internationally.