Laser ablation with full three-dimensional freedom — making the cables and filters that quantum computers and cosmology instruments need and nobody can currently buy at scale.
Nielson Scientific
venture active confidence: Medium status: Useful updated 2026-08-13
Summary
Provo-based Nielson Scientific uses 3D laser nano-ablation to make superconducting flex cables, terahertz filters, beam splitters, and cryogenic probe cards. Its leverage is bottleneck work for far costlier quantum and space experiments, though its $4.65 million federal-award history keeps the demonstrated scale modest.
Impact
The company's argument is stated cleanly in its DOE Phase II abstract: none of the current methods for fabricating superconducting flex cables offers a scalable and economical path to the high-density cables that space instruments and quantum computers need. That is a supply bottleneck, not a science problem. A superconducting quantum processor's usable qubit count is limited in part by how many electrically isolated lines can be run into a dilution refrigerator without hauling in heat; the same constraint shapes cryogenic detector arrays on space telescopes. Whoever makes that interconnect cheaper and denser raises a ceiling that many other people are pushing against.
The terahertz side is the same shape. Metal-mesh filters and polarizers are the optical elements that define passbands for millimeter-wave detectors, and the field that needs them most right now is cosmic microwave background cosmology, where the next-generation instruments require far more of them than the handful of specialist groups worldwide have historically supplied.
Depth is high and breadth is narrow, which is exactly the profile the charter says not to punish for a small audience. What caps it at C is replaceability: the underlying capability is advanced laser micromachining, several institutions and companies have it, and the company's advantage is process know-how rather than an exclusive position. Its counterfactual contribution is real — parts that arrive sooner, cheaper, and denser than the alternative — but it is an acceleration of work that has other routes, not the only route.
Bet: that 3D laser ablation is the manufacturing process that gets superconducting interconnect and terahertz optics out of the one-off, artisanal regime and into repeatable production, and that being early to industrialize it wins the position when quantum and CMB programs scale their orders.
What They Are Building
The core capability is 3D microfabrication and nano-ablation across semiconductors, metals, and other materials — laser machining with, in the company's framing, complete three-dimensional freedom to design and fabricate micro and nano devices, rather than the layer-by-layer constraints of conventional semiconductor processing. Product lines built on it include superconducting cables and flex circuits, terahertz filters and polarizers, silicon beam splitters, cryogenic probe cards, and contract 3D semiconductor etching and nano-ablation services. The company is ISO 9001 certified.
Federal R&D has funded the process development directly. A 2020 DOE STTR Phase I ($206,499, DE-SC0020854, with Brigham Young University) applied an enhanced wire electrical discharge machining approach to silicon wafer production, proposing to "exceed the capabilities of the incumbent diamond wire saw technology by 2-5X on throughput and reduce both kerf-loss and wafer thickness by 60-70%." A 2024 DOE SBIR Phase II ($1,150,000, DE-SC0023907) is developing the scalable nano-ablation approach to high-density superconducting flex cables for quantum computing, communications, and sensing.
What They Need Now
Hiring is production and engineering, on-site in Provo, through the company's own jobs page and careers@nielsonscientific.com. The durable emphasis is microfabrication and ablation production technicians working to IPC standards and digital work instructions, and electrical and mechanical engineers who can carry a process from a federal deliverable into repeatable manufacture. The structural need behind the roles is the transition every SBIR-funded shop faces: converting Phase II process demonstrations into standing commercial orders from quantum-computing and instrument builders.
Who Could Help
Quantum-computing hardware groups and dilution-refrigerator integrators evaluating cryogenic interconnect; CMB and submillimeter instrument teams specifying metal-mesh optics; DOE national-laboratory and NASA instrument procurement contacts; and manufacturing-operations advisors who have taken a precision job shop from federal deliverables to production volume.
Utah Context
Founder and CEO Greg Nielson holds a PhD in mechanical engineering from MIT; the senior team includes Jared Payne (PhD, electrical engineering), with BYU and UVU represented in its engineering bench and BYU as the research partner on the 2020 STTR. The company is a Utah SBIR Center client and appears in the Governor's Office of Economic Opportunity's reporting on Utah firms winning DOE awards. It is the cleanest local example of a company built entirely on non-dilutive federal R&D — it has grown, by its own account, without debt or outside investors — and it puts advanced-manufacturing jobs in Provo rather than in a coastal hardware cluster.
Evidence
- DOE SBIR Award: Nielson Scientific · https://www.sbir.gov/awards/214122 — 2024 Phase II, $1,150,000, contract DE-SC0023907, for scalable high-density superconducting flex cables; UEI
MVTBKVUKLCZ3. - Source: Nielson Scientific SBIR Portfolio · https://www.sbir.gov/portfolio/1239331 — nine Phase I and three Phase II awards, $4,652,265 in total SBIR/STTR funding, first award 2019.
- DOE STTR Phase I award record · https://www.sbir.gov/awards/177925 — $206,499, contract DE-SC0020854, 2020, PI Gregory Nielson, research institution Brigham Young University; the wire-EDM wafering abstract quoted above. Lists the firm at 2778 N 600 E, Lehi, UT.
- U.S. Department of Energy, "Department of Energy Announces $142 Million in Grants to Small Businesses," 2024-09-03 · https://www.energy.gov/science/articles/department-energy-announces-142-million-grants-small-businesses — names Nielson Scientific LLC among 123 Phase II selections and states the superconducting flex cable problem verbatim.
- Nielson Scientific official website · https://nielsonscientific.com — capability description, product lines, ISO 9001 certification, and leadership.
- Nielson Scientific jobs page · https://nielsonscientific.com/jobs-1 — on-site Provo roles, establishing the current operating location.
See Also
- OxEon Energy — the Utah reference case for an SBIR-funded deep-tech company reaching flight hardware.
- InnoSys — a second Salt Lake–area microfabrication company sustained on federal R&D awards.
Open Questions
- Street address unresolved. The company's jobs page places work on-site in Provo; the 2020 SBIR record lists 2778 N 600 E, Lehi, and the 2024 DOE announcement still says Lehi. Third-party profiles give two different Provo suites — 180 N University Ave Ste 270 and 746 E 820 N Ste 270. The map anchor here is Provo at approximate precision until a company-published street address confirms one.
- Founding year is contested: third-party profiles say 2014, the company's site says "since 2017," and the first federal award is 2019.
- Headcount and commercial (non-federal) revenue are not public. The share of work that is federal deliverables versus paying industrial customers is the number that would most change this page.
- Have the superconducting flex cables been adopted by a named quantum-computing or space-instrument program? A design win would be the strongest available evidence for moving the tier.
- Is the terahertz filter work tied to a specific CMB program of record? The connection is plausible from the product line and DOE's interest but is not established by a source cited here.