Ohio State may not be known for developing high-tech businesses, but three electrical engineering faculty members have developed a microchip for a small company that could change OSU’s reputation. Steven Bibyk, Mohammed Ismail and Joanne DeGroat invented a programmable analog microchip called SmartChip. It can make electronic systems more cost effective and easier to design. “Using analog chips has been similar to writing reports with a typewriter instead of a word processor,” Bibyk said. “Every time you made a mistake, it was slow and tedious to correct.”The microchip is about 2 years old and still has a year before it will be distributed, Bibyk said. Ismail has been at OSU for nine years and is a co-founder of Micrys, a company that is attempting to merge technology with big business and wants to sell microchip technology by OSU.Micrys has a development and license agreement with OSU, Bibyk said. “Part of the agreement is that OSU was given 125,000 shares of Micrys stock, which at the time was about five percent,” he added.Micrys has to make minimum payments of $1.5 million to OSU in terms of royalties and research development over five years, he said.”The payments give Micrys the rights to sell the chip and other technology that Micrys pays to develop and give OSU a better chance to see our ideas get to the marketplace,” he said. It’s not easy to start a small business in Columbus, because it is hard to work with institutions like Ohio State, Bibyk said. “Micrys is putting a lot of effort in working with Ohio State at the same time Ohio State is trying to work with small companies,” he said.There are about seven people who are running the 2-year-old company and about 15 OSU electrical engineering graduate students who are being paid to do research. “Ohio State is viewed as a sleeping giant in the sense of being aggressive and taking research results and commercially applying them,” Ismail said. “This will create new jobs and perhaps stop the brain drain of our brightest students to other states such as California,” he said.