Lightwave Electronics Corporation

Lightwave Electronics Corporation was a developer and manufacturer of diode-pumped solid-state lasers, and was a significant contributor to the creation and maturation of this technology. Lightwave Electronics was a technology-focused company, with diverse markets, including science and micromachining. Inventors employed by Lightwave Electronics received 51 US patents, and Lightwave Electronics products were referenced by non-affiliated inventors in 91 US patents.

Lightwave Electronics was a California corporation, which was founded in 1984. Some of the founders were Robert L. Mortensen, a former executive at the laser manufacturer Spectra Physics, and Drs. Robert L. Byer and David Bloom, both professors at Stanford University. The Newport Corporation, then headed by Dr. Milton Chang, was a significant early investor. Mortensen was president at the company’s founding, and he served as president for almost 15 years. Phillip Meredith was president from 2000 until the sale of the company in 2005. JDS Uniphase Corporation (JDSU, now Lumentum, stock ticker LITE) purchased Lightwave in 2005, for $65M. At that time, the company had 120 employees. The company was located in Mountain View, California.

In the scientific community, Lightwave Electronics was best known for single-frequency lasers based on the nonplanar ring oscillator design. These lasers operated at the wavelengths of 1064 nm and 1319 nm, and were based on the laser material neodymium-doped yttrium-aluminum garnet (Nd:YAG). The first-generation Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) was based on these lasers, operating at 1064 nm. Two Lightwave nonplanar oscillators were launched into space in 2004 as components of NASA’s Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer, an earth-observing satellite instrument which was still operational in 2015. Lightwave Electronics produced a visible (532 nm) laser source based on frequency doubling the output of a nonplanar ring oscillator. The nonlinear material used was magnesium-doped lithium niobate. Another member of the nonplanar ring product family was an “injection seeding” system which was used to enforce single-frequency oscillation in 1-joule-level lamp-pumped Q-switched lasers, improving the utility of those lasers for quantitative spectroscopy. This injection seeding system was the first Lightwave Electronics product with significant sales.

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