Tag: Colorado Photonics Industry Association

CPIA Announces Photonics Company of the Year – Ball Aerospace

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At their annual meeting on October 15, the Colorado Photonics Industry Association (CPIA) named Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation as the 2013 Colorado Photonics Company of the Year. The company was selected from more than 200 companies in the aerospace, renewable energy, defense, life sciences, telecommunications, and electronics industries involved in photonics, or light-based, technologies. Ball is the only company to repeat as winner of this prestigious award, having previously won in 2002.

Ball is one of many companies that make outstanding contributions to the Colorado photonics cluster. These companies bring international attention to Colorado as a place to conduct business.

Reasons for recognizing Ball span several years and include the following:

  • The Deep Impact project: Ball designed and manufactured the optical spectrometer that observed the collision between the comet Temple I and the man-made interceptor.
  • Kepler: Ball designed the telescope that has detected several hundred earth-like planets from other solar systems.
  • Ball designed every currently operational instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope.
  • Ball completed delivery of the next generation Operational Land Imager (9 band earth observing spectrometer).
  • Ball designed the optical System for the DoD Space Based Surveillance System that went operational in 2012.
  • Ball designed the Ozone Mapping Profiler Instrument that went operational in 2011 on the Suomi Weather Satellite.
  • Ball designed and built the camera system on the latest Mars Rover.
  • Ball is near completion of the 10-segment Primary Mirror Assembly for the James Webb Space Telescope, a telescope that will allow researchers to literally see back to the beginning of time (although not until the year 2018).

Ball Aerospace was started in Boulder County in 1956, about a year before the start of the great space race.

©Copyright 2011 by CBER.

CPIA Names Real D Company of the Year

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At its most recent quarterly meeting, the Colorado Photonics Industry Association, CPIA, announced Real D as the 2012 Colorado Photonics Company of the Year. The company received its award for contributions to the Colorado photonics industry over the past year. (For those not familiar with photonics, the National Academy Press, presents a great overview in  A Day In Life with Photonics.

Other companies receiving this prestigious award are:
• 2011  ATFilms
• 2010  Research Electro Optics
• 2009  Digital Globe
• 2008  ASD, Inc.
• 2007  Picolight, Inc.
• 2006  PMS
• 2004/2005 Coherent Technologies
• 2003  Spectranetics
• 2002  Ball Aerospace
• 2001  Network Photonics

RealD, is a visual technology developer, manufacturer and licenser enabling premium 3D viewing experiences in the theater, the home and beyond. Because photonics is an enabling technology the competition for the recognition is stiff. RealD was selected from more than 200 companies in the aerospace, renewable energy, defense, life sciences, telecommunications, and electronics industries, which are involved in photonics, or light-based, technologies.

Although 3D has been around since 1915, the company’s technology has revolutionized the film industry by making it easier to create 3D movies. Some in the industry say their impact on the motion pictures has been as significant as when movies went from black and white to color.

The company has an effective business model for capturing and maintaining market share – they lease equipment rather than sell it. This makes it possible for theaters to constatly have the latest technology avialable for their customers. Real D is constantly finding ways to improve their services and products as they are applying their research, technology, and innovation skills to the development of eyewear, video games, and displays.

A sampling of current Real D releases include: Hotel Transylvania, The Hobbit, Oz – The Great and Powerful, the Droods, and Frankenweenie.

©Copyright 2011 by CBER.

Murnane Picked to Chair Committee on the National Medal of Science

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On December 31st the Boulder Daily Camera announced that President Obama had named Margaret Murnane to fill the position of chairwoman of the National Medal of Science. Murnane is the Chair of the Board of KM Labs, a Boulder laser company she and her husband, Henry Kapteyn, started in 1994. In addition she is a JILA Fellow and a Professor of Physics and ECE at the University of Colorado.

The National Medal of Science is a program administered by the National Science Foundation. It is awarded annually to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to science and engineering. In late October Murnane was also awarded the Royal Dublin Society’s Irish Times Boyle Medal for Scientific Excellence for her work in the field of laser physics. Murnane was the first woman to receive this prestigious award.

Murnane is the second woman scientist from Colorado’s photonics cluster to be recognized by the Obama administration within the past three years. The first was Kristina Johnson, who served as the undersecretary for Energy at the DOE for about 18 months. Johnson grew up in Denver and was director of the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center for Optoelectronics Computing Systems Center at CU. Johnson has over 40 patents and helped form multiple startups in Colorado. During her tenure at CU, she and her staff worked with the Business Advancement Center and the private sector to form the Colorado Photonics Industry Association (CPIA). For the past 13 years the group has promoted the cluster of companies which produce precision optics, lasers, optical instruments, and modeling and simulation software.

The achievements of both women have raised Colorado’s standing as a global leader in science and engineering.

 

 

©Copyright 2011 by CBER.

ATFilms – CPIA Company of the Year

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The Colorado Photonics Industry Association (CPIA) hosted its 14th annual membership meeting on October 25 to showcase photonics research being conducted at Colorado’s universities. As well, CPIA also recognized Advanced Thin Films as its Company of the Year.

ATFilms specializes in advanced coating technology available, ion beam sputtering (IBS), and mastering the deposition of precise, dense, and durable films. As well they manufacture a full line of superpolished optical substrates with less than one angstrom RMS micro-roughness.

In addition to hearing presentations by each of the state’s research universities, there was a poster session that featured 26 research projects being conducted by students. Last year, CSU swept the top spots in the poster session; this year the top finishers were from CU and CSU. This year’s winning posters were:

First   “Photolithography Process using Extreme Ultraviolet Lasers”/Wei Li
Second   “Surface Acoustic Wave Metrology using EUV Light” /Kathleen Hoogeboom-Pot
Third   “The Development of Multiparametric Microfluidic Flow Cytometry for Directed Evolution of Red-Fluroescent Proteins”  Kevin M. Dean.

For the uninitiated, photonics is an enabling technology that is a driver of the state and national economy.  The technology is the foundation of the aerospace, biomedical, homeland security, and medical device industries.

Photonics-based technologies impact our daily lives, although we may seldom recognize it. Something as simple as a mirror is a photonics device. Twenty years ago devices such as infrared remote controls, light-emitting diodes, sensors, and laser printers were novelties. Today they are common place. To learn more about the prevalence of photonics in our daily lives click here.

 

©Copyright 2011 by CBER.

Colorado Photonics Cluster Outperforms Job Growth for State

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Can you remember the names and order of all the planets?

Ball Aerospace announced that task just got tougher. In a presentation at the May 18th meeting of the Colorado Photonics Industry Association (CPIA), the local aerospace company discussed their role in the search to find habitable planets.

Pictures taken from a satellite built by Ball, as part of the Kepler project, have confirmed 15 new planets and their composition. That is just the beginning. About 1,000 additional potential planets have been discovered and are being evaluated. Expectations are that 80% will be classified as planets.

A second segment of the CPIA program included a presentation on the performance of the Colorado economy and a review of the Governor’s Bottom-Up Economic Development plan. That discussion focused on the importance of Advanced Technology in Colorado and the growth of the photonics cluster.

The AT cluster is a subset of the Information; Manufacturing; and Professional, Scientific and Technical Services sectors. About 20% of the state’s private sector workers are employed by companies in these three sectors, yet they account for about 35% of the state’s private sector Real GDP.

By comparison, tourism accounts for about 5% of Real GDP and retail is 6%. Both sectors are important to the state in different ways.

The tourism sector is an important part of the economy for the state’s 64 counties. Major attractions include Rocky Mountain National Park, Mesa Verde, mountain sports, and shopping at Cherry Creek mall.

Retail is important to local governments. They derive between 50 to 75% of their total revenue from retail sales taxes. As well, the state and special districts rely on retail sales taxes as their primary source of revenue.

The economic review concluded with a look at an analysis of data  that showed the growth of the photonics cluster between 2004 and 2010. Cluster growth for this six year period exceeded total state growth in all but one employment size category.

In short, the cluster benefitted from growth of renewable energy companies, but suffered from the decline of the state’s semiconductor industry. The analysis illustrates the importance of enabling technologies and how they play a key role in the success of companies in a wide array of industries.

©Copyright 2011 by CBER.