Optical Licenses
Everyone has a friend that appears to know everything. Aren't they annoying? Ours told us that the first electric light was made back in 1800. The inventor was an English scientist named Humphry Davy. He liked to fiddle with electricity. One day, the story goes, he connected wires from a battery he'd made to a piece of carbon. The carbon glowed producing light.
I don't know if the story is true, but it can't be denied: innovation in lighting is choked by the insanely high cost to manufacture solid state devices.
Consider what it takes to manufacture a light. You need tons and tons of raw materials: glass, metals, pumps, ovens and all kinds of crazy poisonous stuff. There has to be a better way.
Meeting the challenge
We own patented proprietary processes and equipment that allows us to manufacture nano-scale devices costing nano-dollars. Why not use what we've developed to tackle the problems associated with solid-state lighting? We knew we could do it because back in the early 1990's part of our R&D yielded some of the tiniest LED's ever made. Why not see what we could do with what we had learned?
That's how the world's first MELTM (Micro Electric Light) was born.
The quest to develop the world's first Solid State White-Light Laser
We set out to build the world's first pure white-light solid state laser. But we laid down some hard rules for ourselves.
First, it had to be insanely cheap to manufacture so extremely poor people could afford to light their homes, schools and workplaces using only a trickle of power.
Second, to twist our noodle, phosphor was banned. No phosphor. Why? phosphor is extremely poisonous to people and animals. Phosphor is the main ingredient in "white"-light LED's (which aren't really white, by the way). It's hazardous to have around, it adds to the expense of the device, and it's hard to work with because you can't get any on you. Remember, we don't ever want to add to the e-waste - electronic waste - problem. At the end of life these devices that contain phosphor will leach into our drinking water when they get buried in a landfill somewhere.
Lastly, the device had to be completely self-contained. In other words, no plastics of any kind are required to encase the device. Why? More materials add to the cost. Plus plastics require handling poisonous substances during the manufacturing process.
Why go through all the trouble? We sleep well at night knowing we're making the world a cleaner place. Call us silly.
What's evil about other forms of lighting?
You can go do the research yourself, but outmoded forms of lighting (i.e., white-light LED's, incandescent bulbs, fluorescent lamps, mercury vapor lights, etc.) have three huge problems: 1.) they consume way too much power - use them and you generate tons of greenhouse gases; 2.) are unnecessarily expensive to manufacture, and 3.) they contain substances that simply will kill you.
For example, although it's generally true that fluorescent lamps use less power than a normal light bulb, they contain mercury and phosphors in large enough amounts that you can see them with your naked eye. The white coating inside the glass tube is a mix of phosphors, the mercury vapor is in large enough amounts to form little beads you can see. More people are switching to fluorescent lighting, but the end of life environmental costs are too high to justify their use. When it burns out you can't just throw it out with your trash. They must be specially processed due to the toxic nature of what's in the glass.
Not a happy thing.
Success!!!
To make a long story short, we achieved our goals: we've developed a non-toxic, self-contained, source of light that consumes very little power. This opens up a wealth of financial opportunity for any company wanting to bring pure white-light from a solid-state laser to the world. Sweet!
What does it look like?
The MEL'sTM spectrum (color) is roughly equivalent to that of sunlight -- but we've removed the harmful parts. We've shaved off the UV - ultra violet - portions to protect your eyes and skin from harmful rays. We've also shaved off the IR - infra red, or heat - so that heat coming from the MELTM doesn't add to your air conditioning bill. At night you'll see roughly the same colors that you see on a sunny summer day.
The MELTM is only the begining
The wonderful thing about inventing is that failures often lead to discoveries. We've discovered how to make novel photonic sensors; new ways of interconnecting circuits using light rather than electrons; ways of bending, tuning, filtering and focusing light; in short we now have a full family of photonic devices available for licensing.
What it means to you and your family
Our optical devices range in size from unimaginably small (only a few atoms across) to any size larger than that. We can turn anything, in any shape, to a light emitting - or collecting - surface. Flat or curved, big or small, we can process it so it becomes an electronic device.
Our process greatly reduces the cost of lighting your home, office or vehicle; it directly reduces the emissions of green house gases due to the miniscule amount of power they consume; it moves data around networks faster; it makes it possible physicians and researchers to detect and identify molecules; ... the list of applications is endless. What is certain is that you and your loved ones will experience huge blessings thanks to our efforts. We make it possible for you to do more, faster, and with less money.
We can turn huge sheets of glass into screens where each pixel is intensely bright and super small -- so small your naked eye can't see what's making the light. This allows engineers to design and build incredibly sharp small displays at resolutions not available in any of today's commercial products.
Our optical devices touch on every aspect of life. Since the topic is so vast, in coming months we will showcase more of the optical devices that are available for licensing.
The following applications are available for licensing:
- LED
- Sensors
- Interconnection
- Circuits
- Displays
- Refractive lenses
- Tunable filters
- Laser diodes
