Tag: Photonics

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.

Colorado Economic Forecast Challenges (Education, Industries, Clusters)

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Another year, another economic forecast.

Looking ahead to 2012, the state will again experience improved, but below average employment growth. Cber.co is projecting that U.S. real GDP growth will be 2.1% to 2.5% in 2012, with employment growth of 27,500 to 37,500 in Colorado. For more details about the Cber.co 2012 Economic Forecast, click here.

There are a myriad of challenges facing the Colorado and U.S. economies in 2012. Some of the key questions relating to these challenges are categorized into the following four areas:
• Demand for goods and services;
• Debt, the financial system, and politics;
• Education and workforce; and
• Industry and cluster issues.

This post raises questions about the topics of education and workforce; and industry and cluster issues. The topics of demand for goods and services; and debt, the financial system, and politics were discussed in a post entitled “Colorado Economic Forecast – Challenges (Demand and Debt).”

Education and the Workforce
• When will the higher education bubble burst?
• How will higher education improve their performance in the classroom?
• How will the state fund PK-12 education, particularly given the outcome of the Lobato education adequacy lawsuit?
• Are high school and college students learning skills that can be transferred between professions?
• What is being done to address the mismatch between the skills that companies need and the skills of job applicants?
• What is the role of the older worker in the workforce? How are companies addressing their impending retirement?
• Has Colorado lost its pool of trained workers as a result of the Lost Decade?

Industry Issues
• How has Colorado’s high tech cluster weathered the Lost Decade?
• Has Colorado lost its critical mass of manufacturers?
• Has Colorado lost the supply chain associated with the decline in its manufacturers?
• Is Colorado saturated with retail stores?
• How will second and third generation businesses transition into the future?
• How much longer can the Health Care sector continue to add jobs?

Cluster Issues
• Is homeland security a cluster that is still important to the state?
• What happened to Colorado’s nanotechnology cluster? Five years ago it was top 10 in the country. Today it is seldom mentioned?
• Several studies have pointed to the rise of Colorado’s biosciences cluster? How will this translate into growth at Fitzsimons?
• How is the software industry going to survive and thrive given the mismatch of skills in the labor pool and the needs of the companies?
• Will 2012 be the year that photonics is recognized for its contribution to the state economy?
• Are state and local leaders poised for the volatility of the renewable energy cluster?
• How will budget reductions affect Colorado’s defense and aerospace clusters?

Clearly, it is easier to point out the difficult challenges than it is to answer questions relating to them. As well, additional obstacles will be added to the list throughout the year. While there is a lot that could go wrong, it is important to keep in mind the state has an equally impressive list of assets that can be used to address the challenges of the future. Game on!

 

©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.