Innolume announced today that it received the 2008 Frost + Sullivan North American Technology Innovation of the Year Award. The Award was presented at the 2008 Growth Excellence Awards Banquet on September 16, 2008 in San Francisco, California.
“Innolume’s unique laser technology is based on quantum dots (QDs), which provide a wide operational spectrum covering 1064 nm to 1310 nm as well as broad optical gain,” explains Avinash Bhaskar, research analyst at Frost & Sullivan. “The company’s technological innovation promises inexpensive yet highly efficient light sources for emerging applications, including silicon photonics for optical interconnect systems and lasers for niche medical applications such as Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT).”
Each year the Frost & Sullivan Award for Product Innovation is presented to the company that has demonstrated excellence in new products and technologies within its industry. Frost & Sullivan’s analysts track all new product launches, R&D spending, products in development, and new product features and modifications—utilizing extensive interviews in addition to technology research. These results are compared among all companies under consideration, evaluated based on degree of innovation and customer satisfaction, and ranked. Product criteria include significance, competitive advantage, innovation, acceptance, value-added services, and number of competitors with similar product(s).
According to Greg Wojcik, Innolume’s V.P. of Engineering, “Our start-up company is honored to have received this prestigious Award from Frost & Sullivan, one of the top international market research and consulting firms. We are particularly pleased by the ‘company’ we are in – our fellow Award winners. Meeting and speaking with these recipients at the Awards Banquet explicitly confirmed Frost & Sullivan’s commitment to meaningful recognition and validated their choices on a very personal level.”
This Frost & Sullivan Award comes at a technological tipping point for Innolume. The company recently announced a unique QD comb laser – the company’s most innovative and forward-looking product to date. This is a single Fabry-Perot semiconductor laser that emits many wavelengths, each of which can be modulated at high speed and combined into an optical fiber or silicon photonic network. The comb laser is an essential enabler for future computer optical interconnects, allowing the low-cost migration of telecom’s wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) technology into the computer. For the first time in laser history, a comb diode laser makes WDM a practical option for short-reach signaling in commodity computer applications.