A tiny Cary startup is developing a laboratory process to convert sawdust into gasoline. A lab in Research Triangle Park is unlocking the energy potential of waste heat from automobile engines.

Both are among the 37 winners of federal energy grants and participated in a three-day advanced energy summit in Washington last week.

The purpose of the Department of Energy summit was to showcase the recently formed Advanced Research Projects Agency, and to raise visibility of the grant winners among investors and venture capitalists.

Phononic Devices, a five-employee startup in Cary, and RTI International, a giant nonprofit think tank with 2,300 local employees, was among those chosen from the nearly 3,700 concept papers submitted.

Phononic's business plan projects demand for more than 250 employees over the next three years, CEO Anthony Atti told a congressional committee in January. The one-year-old company has three workers in Oklahoma and two here, including Atti.

Phononic is developing a technology developed at the University of Oklahoma, but the company is based here to tap into the area's semiconductor brain trust, Atti said.

Capturing and recovering waste heat would tap a vast reservoir of hidden energy, Atti said. The technology could be used to cool computer servers and in refrigeration. It could also be used to generate electricity.

Shortly after winning its $3 million grant from DOE last fall, Phononic secured an additional $2 million in venture capital.

"In this climate early stage capital dollars are hard to come by," Atti said. "That [government] support gives you leverage in terms of going to the private sector."