Danny Rittman: 0:03

It takes the heart rate, it does the SPO2, the oxygen level in the blood, and from that it goes to the internet, to a server, to a program. And you can see it on your mobile phone or on your computer. And then the interesting thing, and we see the highlight of that device, is basically it feeds this information into artificial intelligence program

Tom Raftery: 0:23

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is the digital supply chain podcast the number one podcast focusing on the digitization of supply chain and I'm your host Tom Raftery Hi everyone. Welcome to the Digital Supply Chain podcast. My name is Tom Raftery and with me on the show today, I have my special guest, Danny. Danny, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Danny Rittman: 0:48

Yes. Thank you, Tom. My name is Danny Rittman. I'm the CEO of GBT Technologies. We are a startup, public startup that basically working in a few domains, artificial intelligence the integrated circuit arena, and also communication.

Tom Raftery: 1:02

Okay. Those are quite broad and quite different categories to begin. I mean, integrated circuits are very much hardware, ai, very much software. how did you get into such a, a broad array of things as a startup?

Danny Rittman: 1:20

Well, things actually started, seven to eight years ago. If I look, carefully, we, we started actually in the microchip area and integrated circuits. I myself am a veteran of, many companies. I started my ways at Intel Corporation. In the early nineties, working on one of the nicest microchip that Intel made at the time was a RISC processor. I nine 60, did a heavy graphics very cool stuff. So that's where I was born into the, the high tech world. Worked for Intel for quite some time after, you know, that moved to other projects of Intel, the four entry, six cpu, the five, six, later, the Pentium, et cetera. Later, IBM and Qualcomm. So I brought with, with me some ideas to G B T. We discussed. We decided to move on forward into this direction and started with the unique integrated circuit that did multi functionalities at the time. And inside this multi-functionality of the tube we had part of it, you know, one unit onboard the chip was a radio communication unit. We had some artificial intelligence, we had some encryption, decryption thing, database management, et cetera, etc. So that's where we started. And then we actually took each one of this unit, each topics, and actually developed a whole independent developing on its own. So a few years later G B T started to work on the radio communications iot domain, mainly tracking. And after that, artificial intelligence. We did also some radio communication mesh network devices, and also ultimately for the past few years cybersecurity. We also you know, touched domains like medical apparatus, medical device that basically also in an iot device. a device that measure human vitals and go to the internet to program and get from there you know, the information. So it's another type of in of technology there, but all of them basically are connected together.

Tom Raftery: 3:25

Okay, and who would be potential customers for this?

Danny Rittman: 3:32

If we are talking about the, this Q term, the medical iot device that I'm saying that I mentioned, lastly, the Q term is a small device that basically, you know, two inches over one inch and it measures human vitals via a touch of a finger. If you put the finger for about 20 seconds, it takes the, the body temperature. It takes the heart rate, it does the SPO2, the oxygen level in the blood, and from that it goes to the internet, to a server, to a program. And you can see it on your mobile phone or on your computer. And then the interesting thing, and we see the highlight of that device, is basically it feeds this information into artificial intelligence program. Which does some analytics, does some alerts. Basically maintain history of your health records over time. And of course in any type of, you know issues or potential issues, the system alert. The system can say, Okay, it's time to go for a checkup or see, seek some. You know, medical attention. The nice thing about it, it's a complete telemedicine iot device, means you can be in you know, in in England, in, in London, and your doctor can see your vitals in Los Angeles, you just connect your device to the phone. If you open the website and you say, Okay, I'm taking my vitals now, and your physician can see the results in Los Angeles. So it's, it's a global worldwide. Telemedicine. So that's, that's one of the devices. We finished a, a complete prototype recently. We now working you, you ask about potential customers. Well, we are gonna try to see if we can get some interest, maybe of medical insurance companies to get, you know, a mass product, mass amount of these devices and maybe sell them or give them to cl to customer. It can be definitely done for doctors, for clinics hospitals. It's much easier than put the handcuff and, and do other things with it. We later we want to put BP on it as well, blood pressure and a later version. And, and, and of course, individual people can just buy it individually and have their own personal health assistance at home.

Tom Raftery: 5:45

Okay. And how did you come up with the idea for this? Where did that come from?

Danny Rittman: 5:51

Well, actually, it's funny enough, we, it just happened just by itself. We, we, we saw that the world has gone into the medical I would call it intelligent medical apparatus in the technology side. Ibm you know, 10 years ago, about 10 years ago, I had the, the Watson system, which was. Alliances to Hospital Watson. I don't know if you're familiar, is it completely was, It's an ai, very, very intelligent, very advanced system. They alliances it to hospitals. We start to gain interest in this domain and thought, okay, you know, we, we definitely want to have some footstep in the medical intelligent technology. And, and we decided to do this device, this small, tiny device that actually can take human vitals. Very easy anywhere they are. So that's where we came and then the pandemic hit. Oh, okay. You know, just uh, let's add to the mobile application Proximity alerts. Many people will participate anonymously. With the body temperature, then the system can alert you as you walk in the street. And look, this, you know, you, you, you are approaching a red zone group. People may be sick here. But that was actually before the pandemic started, just slightly before. And just, it was a strategic decision we took due to the interest in this field and opportunities.

Tom Raftery: 7:10

Okay. Fascinating. Fascinating. And you are producing as well 3D multi planer microchips for people who might be unfamiliar . Myself included . I, I, I know a little bit about 3D multiplayer chips cause you know, I've, I've, I've read a little around it, but for others who might be listening who are unfamiliar, what is a 3D multiplanar chip and what kind of advantages does it convey?

Danny Rittman: 7:37

Well, the, typical manufacturing design and manufacture market chips was always done for decades on a, what we call a silicon wafer. It's a piece of flat silicon that. We etch with a, you know, machinery and the fabrication plant, very similar we used to do developer film pictures many years ago. basically produce some light to some mask and, and etching on the silicon, some patterns. Each pattern, of course, is component. They're connected together and eventually forming electronic circuit to do magnificent things. The only thing with this is microchips are getting bigger and bigger, you know today micro check is a constant demand from the design companies, from the public design, micro chip companies. To do bigger chips, smarter chip that consume less power, take less space, and ultimately gonna be cheap. We don't wanna sell the very costly one. We wanna make them cheaper. Let's create a huge challenge. So the industry is scaling down. You hear, okay we may you go down in the nanometer area. Let's make them tinier and tinier. We getting to, you know, we started with you know, 16 nanometer, then we went to fourteen, ten, seven, five, three, and now we're talking about 1.5 nanometer. So that's really becoming tiny, which creates lots of physics problem. Remember, we go to the material, to the silicon level, atom level almost, and is going to cause problem. So, based on experience and based on, what we've seen, you know, for the past few decades, the idea to make a multi planetary 3D chip is to make something that is gonna be multiple plan. I mean, it's not only on the flat surface. Think about a cube you already have. You. If you can put on each side of the cube, a few electronic circuits, then you already created here a 3d, but multi-planetary object or, or structure that you can put more circuits on it. And if you have, you know, hexagon, octagon, or any other shapes this opens a whole world of, of opportunities, especially, for example, memories, memory, chips, or all the disco keys, the flash drives. There are pure real estate silicon on silicon. So if we can take on the same size of this discount a multi-planetary object. The, the chip itself can be a little bit thicker, but you can put exponentially way more. Memory cells on the same similar space. So all of a sudden a flash drive with this drive, this can key like this that has 256 gigabyte, can have a few terabytes on board or even petabytes. So it's enormous opportunity. And that's why we came with this idea. The 3D also offer because of connectivity inner connectivities, connecting in the corners faster connectivity, so it will consume less power, less current it will gonna be faster. So higher performance, less current. Same space. We're going to put megabytes and megabytes of more uh, circuits better for, you know, you can create huge, enormous ai, chips, CPUs, GPU's, memories, name it. And that's where all the idea was born.

Tom Raftery: 10:53

Okay. And what would be, I mean, you mentioned storage is one potential use case, but what are other potential use cases for this kind of technology?

Danny Rittman: 11:03

AI chips. AI chips are mi microchips that really big cloud. They have lots of units in them. They have to run and process complicated circuitries neural network and combination of hardware and software. So these are serious chips that consume a lot of space where there the consumption of lots of space. The multi-planetary chip can be the next generation solution. On the same space. Virtually you can pack exponentially much more. How much exactly we don't know yet. Cuz this is something to research by the foundries, you know? The publication plan that currently made the chips we'll have ultimately to run some research and we hope, you know, we, we are working to maybe find some partners in this domain to work with. But it's a heavy project that's a project of hundreds of million dollars. But we do have the patent granted, so, you know, there will have to tell us, okay, you know, the best multi planetary structure is an octagon or an hexagon or this and this, and this is the, probably the optimized one. But that's something that can be a great solution. Ai, a cpu, gpu. Also, these are also heavy processing units, heavy process on chips space here. Real estate on silicon is crucial.

Tom Raftery: 12:22

Okay. And, and space is crucial as we know, but space is also, if I look at my phone here, for example. Would a 3D chip mean the phone would have to get thicker or are we still talking sub millimeter size? Or how will that work?

Danny Rittman: 12:38

Still sub mm size. Yes. You know, for example, the 3d, the classic 3D chip is not a new thing. It was invented actually a decade ago. Probably more many companies did experimentation with it, but had some flaws with it. Especially because the 3D chips, we built it like a tower and the inner connection, the vertical inner connection between the units turn to consume power, to reduce performance, to get some heating you know, wasting power. So that's why the idea is to, that's one another reason why we looked into the multi-planetary doing it, not only vertically doing it, not only three d. Structure, but also multi planet will open the opportunity to do interconnecting the electrical wires per se. Much easier, much simpler. Simpler as you connect electronic circuit, and that will reduce the power consumption. It'll be more efficient, faster, less reliability issues and overheating. Yeah, so, so that, that's the main thing. So, you know, your, your phone will not be thicker. It will not be, it will be neglectable. Say another, another one millimeter width, or half millimeter, you will not notice. So remember we're talking here micro, micro electronics nanometers range. the price and width and height would not be noticeable.

Tom Raftery: 13:57

Okay. Okay. Okay. And you've also come up with this thing called electronic design automation technology. So tell, tell me what that is and what advantage that conveys.

Danny Rittman: 14:10

That's another yes. Since we are heavily involved in the integrated circuit. The design of advanced nodes microchips is becoming more and more challenging. I briefly mentioned before the physics as we go down into the deep nanometer, seven nanometer, five nanometer, three nanometer below. Physics here doesn't say, okay, you know, here I give you lots of obstacles here, you know Wires get hot because it gets smaller electrons. You know, we have to, to do lots of electro migrations. Again, it's, I'm not gonna go actually, so into Too technical. Yeah, I'll try to keep it simple. Reliability issue of the chip over heating how they handle current performance. All this becoming a problem just because the physics aspect. So we came out also with a tool suite, a software tool suite that we basically run along inside the microchip design software environment. So this software tool suite belonged to a, a field called EDA, Electronic Design Automation. And in this domain, this type of software will be what we call productivity enhancement. And I'll give a quick example. Again, not getting too technical. If, if an advanced microchip, five nanometer has to be checked for design rule for the manufacturing to obey this manufacturing rule for fabrication, it can take a vast amount of time to do it if it's manually, if it's even automatically. So that's what takes, for example, a chip like this, Let's. Takes a design time of one year cycle, you know, 300 engineer work one year. UE provide a software that can automatically check the soil in the background as the designer is working, designing the chip and offer a solution and auto automatic correction on the fly. So what we call a clean by construction of the design. So all of a sudden the designer doesn't need to invest, let's say one week from his time on designing as a. Three days going on fixing this violation that he found the design, all of a sudden it's done automatically for him. So this can provide enormous productivity enhancement. All of a sudden, a chip that takes to design a whole year can take only six months. We can cut it by 50%. That's major. And that's, that's the EDA that the electronic design automation, We offer it in few domains in their reliability. So to make chips work more reliable, less overheated, you know, and live longer, not just die after two years because it got too hot. We offer it in the design rule arena, which is make, you know, give answer to the physics, okay? The physics gives you lots of obstacle to the designers. We're gonna take it away from you. The software will take a look at the physics tools. We'll fix them automatically. Similar to the Microsoft Word red line. Okay, I found the spell typo. I'll, How about I fix it for you? We're gonna fix it for them. And another, another few other area inside the, the microchip productivity enhancement. All this falls into this EDA technology We, we offer.

Tom Raftery: 17:18

Nice. Nice, nice. And you have an offering in computer vision as well? I mean, I can see that there are lots of use cases for that in supply chain, for example.

Danny Rittman: 17:27

Yes, that's another domain. Again, it's directly connected to our ai. It's a combination of our AI and. The radio communication. Since we've been heavily involved in both, we said, okay, you know, we see an opportunity of some innovation to do something that is a bit out of the ordinary. Okay? So for now, for example, if I want to, watch over elderly or, see people and measure their vitals, I have to put some wearables on their arms, or I have to take some vitals. We said no, we want to put just a little router box in the corner for whom it'll transmit radio wave into, you know, same as the router. You have these radio waves go back, you know, in the room and hit some objects and hit some living entities. Reflecting back the reflection, they analyze this reflection. With artificial intelligence, I can actually assemble and create a whole 3d computer vision of that scanned area. Because if the system is very responsive to minor changes of volume, I can actually in one room can measure people heartbeat, heart rate, the breathing rate, breathing rhythm, detect a fall, and that all simple by just one box that stand in the room. So that's their Apollo system. That's a computer vision. It can be used in wide variety of application, as I mentioned, one of them is just put, put a few units like this, for example, in the hospital and you can monitor all patients you know, for safety, for fall detection, their vitals wirelessly completely. You don't need any wearable on their arms or their hands on the necklace. Another application of this system is. Completely be in the eyes of an autonomous vehicle. If I put one box like this in a car, it can see two miles around it radius. So it'd be aware to anything that happens, you know, a half a mile down, you know, down the road a kid is jumping you know, trees falling, other cars near it. So, amazing opportunities. Another one, another one is put it in the airport and you can look because of radio technology. It can detect concealed weapons wirelessly completely don't need anymore to put people in this big machine and scan them, magnetically, et cetera. No, just put a few of these, look at the screen and I can see everything. You know, suspicious we can train. Since it's it has a AI component, we can actually train it and tell it. Okay. You know, just leave the privacy away. I just need to find this type of objects, you know, firearms or this. I need to be alerted. So the, the opportunities here are, are huge for this computer system. You know, it can be alerting drivers from falling asleep, you know, while driving in finding intruders, in a warehouse to just put one box. And if somebody, you know, breaks in, it'll immediately see it. And that's the Apollo system. We got also another granted patent for it, and we plan to continue research in this area.

Tom Raftery: 20:28

Okay, and you have I o T communications as well. Talk to me about that.

Danny Rittman: 20:34

Yes, the iot that's that we mentioned earlier. The IOT is, we started with it about five, six years ago. We built a few tracking technology at the time. The, the nice thing is we had the vision that we wanna have an iot device that can be track globally, means if I'm. Traveling to the Himalaya Mountains, and I'm stuck on the top of the mountain. I want you know, someone to know in San Diego that I'm stuck in here is my exact location. So again, a combination of with or without even a GPS using high frequency radio, but combined as an iot device. We definitely have today mesh technology, which also used for iot. We have devices that speak with the others, and as more we have, they can of course pass along the signal so I can cover much larger distances. GBT created a few IoT prototypes, started with a simple pet tracker at the time for pets, but very intelligent one again, mesh. If you live in la, travel to New York and lost your dog in New York. You will be able to see in LA where it is in New York. And later on we created another system, iot, for mesh technology that similar to the pet tracker, but more advanced and work in the mesh concept.

Tom Raftery: 21:57

Okay. And how does it work without gps? How does that, You said high frequency radio waves. How does that work?

Danny Rittman: 22:35

That's the beauty. We, the idea was, okay, you know, GPS is great and if I have it, I'm gonna use it. We do have a GPS on board as well. We're not gonna reinvent the wheel, but what if I'm in a cave? What if I'm in an area that is blocked from the skies and I don't have access to gps? Then we still wanted to overcome this problem and we said, okay. The only solution is what we call hf, High frequency Radio technology, what we call SkyWaves. But that required actually intelligent approach to this as well because as you know, SkyWaves, you know, they bounce to the ionosphere, go back to earth, go back to ionosphere, and they can travel like this all around earth. But because they bounce back, you can have what we call a skip zone, a dead zone, which is a, a zone that there was no reception. But we solved that as well. We recruited to our help, our artificial intelligence and we said, Okay, you know, if there is a dead zone, I have a few, assuming I have a network of few base units you know, one in Seattle, but for the example, one in la, one in New York City. And if someone want to communicate in a dead zone, the system, the AI automatically will calculate Which base unit the signal will be reroute. It's very similar to how you reroute flights. Sometime in order to fly from Los Angeles to New York, you have to go to Texas, so you have to go to another hub. Same here. The signal will go to another base unit and arrive eventually to the person that want to establish communication. Even if it takes another split second, but the communication will be done. So with the help of ai, we solve the problem uh, using, uh, high frequency technology.

Tom Raftery: 24:22

Okay. And you mentioned as well, cyber security. Talk to me about that because that's not, that's actually not a topic we've discussed much on this podcast. And that's, my fault, , I should be looking out more for that because it is an increasingly important topic for supply chain. So talk to me a little bit about that.

Danny Rittman: 24:40

Well, naturally, you know, we started all this, you know, heavily and again, about six, seven years ago. We immediately notice cyber security is, is a very crucial aspect of all the, especially when you deal with networks and, and we do have private networks for our system. We have radio network, you know, a few type of networks. And if you don't take care of this, we, we don't need to mention that the whole world sees what's the, the results. Cyber security is becoming more and more crucial. We have to provide answers to protect, you know, safety, security, privacy, and all these. So very quick. We identified that we need to provide and to develop. First we adopted some typical standards, you know, in the domain. And later on we actually went and, and developed our own a key exchange algorithms and actually smart encryption decryption uh, proprietary technology because we have a lot to protect. And for example, you know, the medical apparatus, the, the Q term, you know, now just sending information, you know, but this information, if it's grabbed by hackers or by anyone else, then all of a sudden all your, you know, health data and personal data are stolen. So we are working uh, heavily into this. It falls into IoT by the way, of this device. After all, it's a medical iot device. And iot by nature are very susceptible currently to cyber threats. That's unfortunate. And why is that? I one more minute from your time here, because IoT devices are basically vulnerable by nature. They work typically they radio communication involved. They typically have not enough secured password. Typically it's even hard coded passwords that are given to them. Your printer or your, you know, anything else to your printer. You know, hackers can actually hack into your home network or business network and start to, to steal some information or cause some damage. So iot, we feel needs by its inception, by definition, needs to be strengthening majorly with the cybersecurity. And, but not on the iot. So this is just one side. And that's where we, I'm returning back to the topic. We developed algorithms, we developed the technology. We developed special security system to secure our networks. This security systems are definitely meet the standard, the AEs, for example, or any others, and even exceed them. So we have 10 24 bit encryption, not only 256. We have heavy, we, we, we implemented a honey, honey encryption, which is another level of protection. And we also have our own key exchange technology. Again, don't want to get too technical, just to convey that we, we heavily invested into this domain because we believe that especially the domains that we are touching. It's ai. If it's communication, if it's IoT and, and networks we have to provide a robust substantial cyber security technology on top of this,

Tom Raftery: 27:54

Okay. Okay. And where to next for G B T? Because you have a lot of irons in the fire. What, what? What's next for you guys?

Danny Rittman: 28:03

right? So we, we, we try to go, you know, first of all, we. We protect our ip. You can read, you know, people can read by the peer. We're very good by communicating to the public, being transparent by via prs. We find lots of patents for our technology. And we have you know, granted the major patents already for the computer vision system. We have for the microchip, for the 3D multi planner, and that's we consider one of our major advantage we have is we actually got a granted patent and we continue filing continuation patents to get more and more protection for our ideas. And as a startup, we are also working to develop prototypes where we can do it, when we can afford it. So, you know, microchip to develop a microchip. Well, for this, we'll seek, we will probably seek some, some partners, you know, if it's in the fabrication area, somebody that enable us with more budgets. It, it's expensive, but with all others we do develop prototypes and this, we basically try to commercialize and gain some profit. So where we are heading from here, we definitely gonna continue our development in the artificial intelligence field. We believe the combination of artificial intelligence and the medical field is a good combination. Finding, detecting, you know suspicious anomalies you know, with health can really help people and benefit. Okay. You know, I can scan this uh, MRI and find some objects that maybe, you know, is very tiny or, or weird shape and somehow, you know escaped the human eye and we can alert for that. And, and we will continue in the IOT domain since we believe this also domain that is gaining and will gain constant momentum forward especially in the autonomous vehicles smart cities. And naturally we also are gonna continue with the integrated circuits because that's where we heavily invested as well. We consider integrated circuit the microchip. As the new gold of today, everything has a smart chip. If it's a car, if it's a TV or computer, laptop, phone, or a toy. So we definitely, these are the three major domains. The G B T plans to move forward to remain is uh, the microchip arena, is the AI for the medical field and the IOT and com radio communication areas.

Tom Raftery: 30:39

Okay. Cool. Cool. We're coming towards the end of the podcast now. Danny, is there any question I haven't asked that you wish I had?

Danny Rittman: 30:47

No think, I think we, we covered nicely the, all the fields that G B T is heavily invested in. We are also looking into, you know, maybe a few more other things into other, what we call futuristic arenas that you know, we will publish. Of course prs and then to the public. When I say futuristic is again, is more EDA, more technology, more uh, what we call productivity enhancements is the world is accounting, our shortage of a chip. We wanna offer some automation software design automation to accelerate the design to enable creation. Smarter advanced nodes chip faster. You know, better performance smaller in size and of course cheaper. So our world will be more advanced. And also in the uh, communication and, and IoT arena, that's the main direction we're gonna work.

Tom Raftery: 31:41

Okay. Super great. Danny, it's been interesting. If people want to know more about yourself or G B T or any of the things we discussed in the podcast, where would you have me direct them?

Danny Rittman: 31:52

I believe that the best is GBT website is g b tti.com. We have a nice links there too. We, we now started to invest it more because we, we want to educate also about, you know, what we do more so we to be transparent with technology. So we post videos there. We have a blog, so this is probably the best place. We also have, I believe the company has a, a good substantial social media and if it's on the the Instagram and Facebook and I believe the also LinkedIn. So there all these resources that are available online for the company can definitely provide a good enough information.

Tom Raftery: 32:29

Super, super Denny. It's been really interesting. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Danny Rittman: 32:34

Thank you very much for having me. Thank you. Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about digital supply chains, simply drop me an email to Tom raftery@outlook.com. If you'd like to show, please, don't forget to click follow on it in your podcast. Application of choice, to be sure to get new episodes. As soon as they're published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find the show. Thanks. Catch you all next time.