Jefferson Rides Crest of Photonics Wave
Published Apr 16, 2004
Photonics researchers use light to produce everything from traffic lights to compact disks.
More than 50 years ago, the very first mass-produced color television sets rolled off an RCA assembly line in Bloomington, Ind. Those first color TVs weighed 160 pounds each, had 15-inch screens and, with their bulky wooden casings, looked more like pieces of furniture than electronics.
Today, Americans buy approximately 25 million new televisions each year, with sales of high-tech, high-definition (HDTV) sets growing at the fastest rate. Since they were first introduced in 1998, more than 9 million HDTVs have been purchased by American consumers, while an additional 4 million are predicted to be sold in 2004.
Although few HDTV sets are actually made in America these days (most are assembled in Asia or Mexico), a portion of the optical technology behind the latest advances in HDTV, particularly Digital Light Processing (DLP?) by Texas Instruments, is engineered and manufactured in the domestic science labs of high-tech photonics companies like Unaxis Optics. Unaxis is located in Jefferson County’s Coors Technology Center. The $1.2 billion Swiss semi- conductor manufacturing company opened its Golden optics plant in 1996. Today, that plant produces coated optical components for data and video projection, optical instruments and sensors, and lighting. The plant, which employs more than 150, is also responsible for capturing an 80 percent market share of the global optical component market for DLP? TV and projector technology.
“What’s interesting in our case is that we regularly ship hundreds of thousands of high-tech components every month around the world and particularly into Asia,” says Ed Yousse, national sales manager for Unaxis Optics. “At a time where such a large portion of the new technology is imported to the United States and globally from Asia, it would be a unique situation for us to be exporting components into those markets.”
According to Yousse, the success of the Unaxis Optics plant in Golden can be attributed to a combination of factors, including the availability of research and development resources nearby, as well as the strong local workforce of engineers and technicians.
Unaxis Optics isn’t the only photonics company finding success in the state. According to a recent study from the Colorado Photonics Industry Association (CPIA), the state’s photonics industry has grown considerably in recent years. Four major universities in Colorado offer photonics programs, four federal laboratories located in the state incorporate photonics in their research programs and 242 organizations are classified as part of the Colorado photonics cluster.
So what, exactly, does the term “photonics” mean? The CPIA defines it as the core, enabling technology that encompasses techniques, devices, instruments and systems that generate, modify or utilize electromagnetic energy in the wavelength. In layman’s terms, photonics is any optical technology – from traffic lights and LCD alarm clock displays to compact discs and laser printers.
“What we do, like so many other companies in the photonics industry, is harness the science of optics to make an existing technology better. In the case of DLP, Unaxis Optics is making HDTV even sharper and lifelike,” Yousse says.
Story by Valerie B. Shead
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