Professor En-Te Hwu (Edwin) is a specialist in hacking consumer electronics and has developed customized instruments to perform unique research, which commercial systems cannot fulfill. He often builds instruments with an unorthodox approach, implementing consumer electronics components. This is more complicated than using standard research-grade parts.

Nevertheless, leveraging the billions of USD invested in consumer electronics, mass-produced, high-quality, and low-cost components lead to many benefits such as higher performance, shorter time-to-market and lower production cost.

This approach has resulted in high value-adding technologies/patents and has given birth to 6+2 startup companies. For example, Blu-ray drive-based 3D printing10 led to the startup: Atto3D. Another startup, BluSense Diagnostics, uses a Blu-ray drive for disease diagnostics, and was nominated for the 2021 European Inventor Award. Nt-Unit and Atto3D teams received the largest TW and DK governmental pre-startup prize, respectively.

You can see his talk here.

Professor En-Te Hwu (Edwin)

Hacking consumer electronics is an unorthodox approach, which might be more complicated than using standard research-grade parts. This approach has resulted in high value-adding technologies and has given birth to startup companies easily.