Company

Micro-Beam is an engineering company founded in 1993. Its activities are directly linked to the competences of the individualities who make up our team.

People

	Laurent Cardoletti is The Expert of sensorless drives. His expertise in the field dates back in the late eighties, when he developped a sensorless drive for the hard disk industry while doing his PhD. He is also one of the founders of Micro-Beam.
	Christian Fleury is the director of the company since 1999. Christian got his PhD for the modelling of the brushless drivers. He has expertise from motor design to electric drives including vibration analysis, Kalman filtering and advanced control.
	Christian Koechli is the motor designer of our team. He started to model and optimise single phase brushless motors for his PhD. He then moved to optimising induction motors, three phase brushless motors and other types of special transducers: his goal is to be able to optimise any kind of electromecanical device !
	Thierry Bieler does mechanical design, electronic design and also works in motor control and embedded software. He can do any kind of engineering from contactless energy transmission to special carbon fiber structures! Whatever your problem might be, he will certainly find and implement an innovative solution to it.
	Simon Tinguely got his master in Micro-engineering at the EPFL in 2008. He mainly works on embedded software, electronic design, mechanical design using a CAD software and BLDC motor design and optimization. He also worked on lithium polymer batteries to offer a solution with a custom Battery Mangagement System (BMS).

History

Micro-Beam was founded in 1993 by two engineers from the EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne) Dr. Laurent Cardoletti and Dr. Yves Perriard, in the field of motor design and control.

Sensorless drivers for Brushless DC motors has always been our key technology at the origin of the success of the company. Dr. Laurent Cardoletti  is among the most experienced engineer in the sensorless field (a search on the internet will show you that he is known and referenced all around the world).

His work in the sensorless field started in 1989 at the EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology http://lai.epfl.ch) and resulted to the introduction of the sensorless technology in every single Hard Disk Drive produced since 1992. Indeed Seagate Technology was supporting his research in the nineties and successfully integrated it in Seagate products. Consequent inventions in the sensorless field have been assigned to Seagate with Dr. Cardoletti as Inventor (U.S. Pat. No. 5,001,405., U.S. Pat. No. 5,117,165, U.S. Pat. No.5,245,256).

Encouraged by this success,  Dr. Laurent Cardoletti founded the Company Micro-Beam in 1993, along  with Dr. Yves Perriard. Micro-Beam conducted new research program in the sensorless field and filed a patent  in October 2, 1998 (PCT/CH98/00421) to protect a new approach of the sensorless technology. The corresponding U.S. Pat. No. 6,326,760 has been issued in April 5, 2000.

Micro-Beam did grow slowly, developping day after day new electrical drive solutions for numerous insdustrial customers.  A team of 5 people offers today a wide range of know how in the electrical drive field.