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A posse of Colorado photonics companies will saddle up and move on out to San Jose Convention Center, January 22-24th in order to attend the largest photonics event in North America: Photonics West
As with any premier trade show and industry conference, the goal is to meet suppliers, network, discover new innovations and take advantage of a plethora of professional sessions.
Barb Ihde, Executive Director of the Colorado Photonics Industry Association (CPIA), http://www.coloradophotonics.org/index.php emphasizes that the photonics cluster in Colorado is comprised of over 300 small and large companies, from KMLabs 'first in cryocooling' to Ball Aerospace.
Several photonics companies are homegrown, such as Meadowlark Optics in Frederick, Colorado, that started as a research project in a spare bedroom, moved to the barn, took over the chicken coop and now sports a 20,000 square foot manufacturing facility that produces ultrahigh-quality polarization optics for customers around the world. http://www.meadowlarkoptics.com/index.php
Other Colorado photonic companies are offshoots of larger international corporations. In the last quarter of 2007, Alpine Research Optics of Boulder, a leading supplier of high performance coated optics, was acquired by Saint-Gobain Crystals, part of a larger $52 billion conglomeration based in Paris.
The SAES Getters Group, headquartered in Milan, Italy has a manufacturing, sales and service operation in Colorado Springs. Oerlikon Optics USA Inc.'s parent company is based in Switzerland and touts close to 100 employees at a manufacturing plant in Golden, Colorado, producing thin-film products used in a variety of industries.
Colorado also boasts four federally funded laboratories with photonics facilities, four premier educational institutions that have produced three Nobel Physics prize winners for photonics related research and the only Advanced Photonics Technology center in the U.S. http://www.captcenter.org/
SPIE, organizer of Photonics West, is an international society advancing an interdisciplinary approach to the science and application of light. Wednesday the 23rd will feature an evening 'cluster summit' involving leaders from 15-20 geographic areas from around the world representing the best in photonics innovation, research and manufacturing. http://spie.org/x2584.xml .
