History Details

The Donner Scientific Company was founded by William K. Rosenberry in Berkeley, Calif. in 1953 in order to serve the then-burgeoning aerospace industry. Growing quickly with the success of its inertial test products for systems such as the F-4 Phantom fighter and the Atlas rocket, the company merged with the Systron Corporation in 1960. Systron Donner’s new products found their way into such storied vehicles as the X-15 rocket plane, the Mercury capsule that carried astronaut John Glenn into orbit and the Apollo 11 rocket to the moon.

Systron Donner continued to grow, with different parent companies taking ownership of it throughout the years, as its technology was incorporated into systems such as the F-16 fighter, various missile programs, and NASA’s Landsat and GOES satellites.

It was the end of the Cold War which precipitated the most momentous shift in the company’s history and presaged the “Automotive” addition to its name. With defense budgets dwindling and electronic technology promising benefits unimagined by its mechanical forebears, Systron Donner, in 1985, undertook a bold initiative to leverage both of these incipient trends. The company’s next innovation would find its inspiration in the quartz tuning fork used in watch crystals. Under the leadership of Chief Scientist Harold Morris, Systron Donner labored for five years to create a solid-state angular-rate sensor: the Quartz Rate Sensor (QRS) which utilized a unique double-ended tuning fork design. The QRS was the original iteration of today’s MicroGyro™.

The MicroGyro® is revolutionary. Utilizing a smaller, more refined version of the QRS tuning fork machined at the microscopic level, it can sense an astonishing range of angular-rate changes in a cost-effective and compact unit. Although a predecessor of the MicroGyro® helped the Pathfinder Rover find its way around Mars, it was its introduction into automotive safety systems which fundamentally transformed the company.

In 1997, Cadillac introduced StabiliTrak, its trade name for what is now commonly known as ESC, or electronic stability control. Systron Donner Automotive’s angular-rate sensor helped to make StabiliTrak (and thus ESC) a reality, and helped the company transition from dwindling defense products to a booming automotive market serving OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers alike. Two years after Cadillac, the inertial technology had found its way into 15 automotive brands. Today, with ESC mandated by the U.S. government in all vehicles by 2012, Systron Donner Automotive’s prospects are impressive.