Plenary Session Remarks
“I am honored to be standing among so many people that have helped create what many analysts believe is a nearly $50B Compound Semiconductor Market-and, expected to continue to grow. It is impossible to have imagined how we would have gotten here today without people, companies, universities, and government funding agencies not investing in basic research and development in materials, devices, subsystems, equipment, and applications. It is exciting beyond the imagination…
At its core, IIVI is an engineered materials company, and has at the core of our strategy process and capital intensive platforms where vertical integration and IP impart a differentiated advantage. We are operating in multiple growth markets that are inflecting including 3D Sensing, Lidar, Hyperscale data centers supporting the cloud and mobility, and, 5g infrastructure, EUV Lithography, high energy lasers for aerospace and defense, and, a transition to all electric vehicles among them.
They say that all progress depends on unreasonable people. I would like to acknowledge the pioneers of semiconductor laser materials and devices on whose backs we have walked for nearly 60 years, but a major turn took another major turn about 30 years ago in fact.
I did work in a group at AT&T Bell Labs in 1988 where many of my colleagues there of the likes of giants like Bill Gault, the co-inventor of VGF Crystal Growth of low dislocation density Compound Semiconductor Substrates, MBE growers like Ron Leibenguth, device designers like Jack Jewell, Alex Scherer, Yong Lee, Niloy Dutta, the late Leo Chirovsky among so many other incorrigible innovators and unreasonable people who envisioned the widespread commercial deployments of products based on VCSELs after Jack and his collaborators in 1989-demonstrated over 1 million (VCSELs) on a ~5x8mm chip.
The extreme number, size and density attracted lots of attention. The underlying innovations sparked worldwide industrial development and pursuit of VCSELs, and are now incorporated in all commercial VCSELs (thin/practical active regions, >99% semiconductor mirror reflectivities, graded interfaces enabling efficient current flow and injection, and the enabled all-semiconductor design). VCSELs are used in fiber communications, laser mice, miniature atomic clocks, Lidar Sensors, medical diagnostics, and structured-light generation…”