Paul Whalen was an entrepreneur, working in the semi-conductor business; holding patents in the semi-conductor industry as well as patents for the wind-up radio and a safety shut-off valve for pressurized gas tanks.
In the late 1990's, he and his wife Andrea, decided to start up their own automation company in San Jose. Whalen had patented the technology for a robotic system that could transport silicon wafers from a storage room to a "clean room", limiting the amount of particles that would get on the silicon wafer. His technology was designed to be built with "off the shelf" parts, savings many thousands of dollars. .
Somewhere around 2003, Paul and HAAS Automation developed a Joint Venture to mass-produce the retical stocker and robotic clean room. Paul had found investors, and collected $3.3 million.
Within 9 months, Paul and Andrea (the CEO and CFO of the company – Intrabay) burned through the ENTIRE $3.3 million.
After a couple of years of no significant sales or production of the product, and no other source of funding or investors, both sides decided to close the joint venture. During this time, Intrabay was also losing money, and Paul and Andrea decided to move back to the San Jose Area and get "regular jobs". This became a bitter dissolution, and in 2005, Paul decided he wanted to pick up his "intellectual property" from the HAAS factory, specifically the clean room and other robots.
On June 23, 2005, Paul went to pick up some of his equipment. Not all of the equipment was ready to be picked up, and his vehicle was not large enough for the "plenum" of the clean room, so he was going to schedule another trip down to HAAS on August 25-26, 2005 – the alleged date of the accident.
The breakup was so bitter, that both sides had determined that an outside party should be hired to witness the picking up of Paul's equipment.
