News-Herald
September 15, 2006

Not just a rock

• Eastlake firm marks 50 years fitting quartz into everyday usage

Brandon C. Baker
Bbaker@News-Herald.com

Fifty years after Eastlake-based Sawyer Technical Materials LLC became the first commercial producer of cultured quartz crystal for electronic usage, the mineral is now used routinely for products within worldwide infrastructures, including automobiles and cell phones.

In celebration of this golden anniversary, the staff at Sawyer, 35400 Lakeland Blvd., plans on finding ways to use and produce cultured quartz.

“With technology, you need to keep coming with new things,” said Fred Taylor, Sawyer’s chief financial officer and co-owner.

“You can’t just ride your (premier) products because they will die over time.”

Sawyer, which also has operations in Texas and China, made sure it wouldn’t die by making structure and mission changes in 2004.

During an all-around down-sizing period, Sawyer’s Conroe, Texas plant was hit hardest, losing more than 200 employees since 1999, officials say.

Still, a main goal for the future is to leverage the assets gained from 50 years of quartz growth into new products, Vice President Janet M. Radwanski said.

Those include crystalline powders and ceramics for a plethora of applications, like catalysts and cosmetics.

“We’re using our similar equipment and people who know a lot about the equipment to go into new areas,” Taylor said. “We think these new powders and ceramics are some of our best opportunities to do that.”

Despite these plans, Radwanski says Sawyer’s biggest volume product is quartz as a sensor for stability control for braking systems within sport utility vehicles.

“It’s a sensor that can tell when the car’s going to go into a skid and apply the brakes differentially to stop that from happening or prevent something with a high center of gravity from rolling over,” Radwanski said.

Systron-Donner, an automotive division of Schneider Electric in Concord, Calif., is the beneficiary of quartz wafers that Sawyer makes. Sawyer has been supplying the company since the late ‘80s.

“We went worldwide looking for a supplier and it was Sawyer that chose to supply us,” said Linda Duncan, a buyer for Systron-Donner.

“Both companies have worked well together, constantly developing a better product.”

In addition to that technology, which originated from use for guided missile systems in the ‘80s, Sawyer also uses quartz for intermediate frequency filters in multifunctional cell phones, Radwanski said.

“It’s basically adapting the signal that gets pulled from the air to a specific frequency that’s associated with your cell phone,” Radwanski said. “This IF filter is what helps choose the signal that you want to hear on your cell phone.”

Though a silicon-based technology has replaced a lot of the quartz filters in phones, Sawyer still holds close to 50 percent share of the quartz market, just as it did during the early cell phone boom, Radwanski said.

In the aftermath of major changes, Radwanski said it was important to instill pride in employees, particularly regarding the involvement in the stability control sensors, which can save lives.

“It’s a message that we tried to get our employees to buy into,” she said. “We have a good group of survivors from a really bad downturn; (it was important) for them to get excited for the business and the future.”