Talk:Lightwave Electronics Corporation

Relevant section from first reference:

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CLEO 1987 also saw a rather different laser-diode trend: high powers to pump solid-state lasers, as we reported in our July 1987 issue. Laser diode power had risen steadily over the years, aided by the integration of many laser stripes on a single semiconductor bar, pioneered in 1978 by Don Scifres and colleagues at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, who generated more than 100 mW per facet.

GaAlAs was the right stuff for diode pumping because it could efficiently generate light in the 808-nm pump band of neodymium lasers. Scifres went on to commercialize the technology at Spectra Diode Labs (San Jose, CA), which showed high-power diodes including a 1 W quantum-well phased array emitting at 800-840 nm at CLEO 1987. Other companies showed diode-pumped lasers, including Spectra-Physics (Mountain View, CA), Lightwave Electronics (Mountain View), A-B Lasers (Concord, MA), and Amoco Laser (Naperville, IL). Spectra-Physics featured three diode-pumped lasers on its back-cover ad in July 1987 (see Fig. 6), emitting CW or Q-switched at 1.06 μm or pulsed at the green second harmonic.

Relevant section from second reference:

At about the same time, another team of scientists across the country in Silicon Valley also was founding a new laser diode company. Robert Mortensen had worked on lasers for 11 years at Spectra-Physics Inc., had founded his own startup company called Quanta Ray and sold it to Spectra-Physics in 1981. But by 1984, he was getting the entrepreneurial itch again. He approached a friend who was a professor at Stanford University and asked “whether he had anything in his labs he was willing to bet his wife, house, and kids on.” Robert Byer, now a vice provost at Stanford, showed Mortensen a laser powered by a laser diode. At about the same time, another friend who also was a Stanford professor, David Bloom, telephoned Mortensen and told him he had an idea for using lasers as a diagnostic tool to measure voltages in integrated circuits up to microwave frequencies.

Mortensen liked both ideas, so he cofounded Lightwave. Electronics Corp. in 1985 with both professors. But, unlike Olsen, they had to rely on their own personal funds and help from the federal government’s Small Business Innovation Research program to get themselves started. “We have fragmented markets, so we tend not to be of as much interest to venture capitalists,” says Mortensen. In fact, one of the problems with interesting investors in the field, he says, is the diversity of the applications that use lasers. “It makes it hard to understand, hard to validate the market size,” he says. “It’s difficult to sell to people.” Today, Lightwave is one of the companies most cited by investors and scientists as a success in making solid state lasers powered by diodes.

But despite success stories like EPITAXX and Lightwave, there have also been an abundance of failures. As Olsen recalls the dozen or so laser diode companies that started about five years ago, he names four or five that either have gone bankrupt, are struggling to survive, or have been absorbed by their parent companies. “Hardly a month goes by that one laser company doesn’t buy another," observes Charles Troy, managing editor of Photonics Spectra, a trade publication.

Patents as valid secondary sources:

Patents can be considered as self-published, and thus not of strong value in showing a significant contribution to technology. However, most patents are written with care and concern for accuracy, since a false or incomplete description of an invention can invalidate the patent. In the body of a patent (but not the claims) the inventor must describe with specificity what is needed to construct the invention. Thus a reference to a specific product in a patent by a non-affiliated inventor is good evidence of the importance of the product, and can be considered to be a secondary source.

It is hard to find good secondary sources in industrial technology. Unlike the academic world, publishing of "the details" is rare outside of the patent literature. So the patent literature should be valued and used.C=lambda*nu (talk) 18:58, 8 December 2015 (UTC)