Photonics center moves to Denver campus

DENVER – With its move from Longmont to Denver, the Colorado Advanced Photonics Technology Center will continue and hopefully expand its mission to support photonics in Colorado.

Previously a nonprofit organization, the CAPT Center is being operated by the University of Colorado at Denver and has moved to the Auraria campus. Renjeng Su, dean of the College of Engineering at the CU-Denver campus, proposed the idea when the center was looking for a new business model in 2004. The CAPT Center board of directors agreed with Su’s vision, and now the center is being operated by the College of Engineering, School of Medicine and School of Dentistry to provide services to the photonics and biomedical industry.

The CAPT Center was created to help startups and small to midsize companies succeed in the photonics industry. Photonics deals with the generation, manipulation and detection of light. It has applications in a variety of industries including medical devices, computers, telecommunications, biotechnology, military weapons, remote sensing, transportation and space exploration.

Photonics equipment can be expensive and difficult for startups and small companies to afford. Rather than having to invest in the equipment, the center offers companies several labs with measurement and fabrication equipment that can be used for a fee.

“It is particularly useful to small companies because they don’t have the resources to get into large labs that have the expertise and equipment that the CAPT Center has,´ said Garry Gorsuch, president of the Colorado Photonics Industry Association and chief executive officer of Meadowlark Optics in Frederick. “Being part of a university just enhances that capability because of the technical knowledge there and their commitment to keeping it open to individuals throughout the state.”

In addition to supporting startup and midsize companies, the CAPT Center is expanding its mission to include an increased emphasis on research and education.

“Although research and education were initially stated in the original charter, over time it had not been growing in the manner envisioned by the founders,” Su said. “Being part of the university campus and organization will naturally make education and research a part of daily life.”

Su plans to make the center into a meeting ground for professional engineers, university faculty and students to tackle technology problems in the industry. At the same time problems are being solved, students will be trained to become engineers and entrepreneurs in photonics. In fact, Su believes industry colleagues are key to the success of the center and its goals.

Su would also like the center to continue as an incubator for new companies, including having students graduate and start new companies. “There is no replacement for growing your own good people,” he said. “It will provide strong growth for many years to come.”

According to Gary Horvath, managing director of the business research division of CU’s Leeds School of Business, there are about 250 companies in the cluster directly working with photonics. The concentration of companies is primarily in Boulder County and covers everything from large companies like Ball Corp. and Lockheed Martin to smaller companies. In fact, most of the companies in the cluster are small, employing about 10 to 15 people, he said.

“The thing that is exciting to see is that the concentration of companies has spread outside of Boulder County, and includes more companies in Colorado Springs, Fort Collins and Denver,” Horvath said.

Many companies have started out of CU-Boulder or have chosen to locate near the university. However, he sees a lot of crossover between nanotechnology and photonics, especially in defense and homeland security applications. According to Horvath, the nanotechnology corridor encompasses Boulder, Jefferson and El Paso counties. As the two become intertwined, the photonics industry is expanding. He used the example of environmental sensors.

“If you have a sensor set up to sense a gas, or sense something in the air, it can be used as safety device, but it also has homeland security applications,” he explained. As a result, a lot of companies in Colorado Springs are in photonics.

Photonics is experiencing considerable growth in the biomedical industry, Su said. For example, sensors can be used for diabetes patients to assess their blood sugar levels rather than having to take a blood sample. According to Su, the CAPT Center has already done a lot of work with medical devices over the last year.

The CAPT Center opened in 1998 at Lowry Air Force Base with funding from the state legislature. It lost its state operating funds in 2002, the same year it moved to Longmont to be closer to the photonics cluster. It continued as a nonprofit organization until CU-Denver took ownership of it.

“It was the taxpayers of the state of Colorado that made it (the center) happen,” Su said. “I am happy to turn a taxpayer-supported, nonprofit facility into one for academic use.”

The CAPT Center closed its Longmont location in August and completed its move to the Auraria campus in mid-September. The lab was planned to be fully up and running by mid-to-late October.

CU provided the funding for the move and remodeling. The College of Engineering and Applied Sciences played the largest role and budgeted $100,000. Su did not yet know the total cost of the move, but believed it had been kept to a “reasonable” amount. The college will provide staff support for accounting and communications, as well as infrastructure like computers and telephones.

The goal is to run the center as a self-sufficient operation using revenue from August 2005 to August 2006 as well as revenue generated from ongoing membership dues and equipment fees. The center has been running a small positive balance. He expects there may be a transition period due to the move, but hopes to ramp up the center to the level of work it was doing in Longmont, and then to grow it in time.

Tim Lei and Larry Scherrer are responsible for the day-to-day operations of the center. When business allows, Su hopes to hire students as part-time research assistants in the center.

“The real long-term challenge is how we make the network between different industries and different academic disciplines so the link from the technical world to the academic world will be made strong,” Su said. “With good planning it can be accomplished, but it takes a lot of talking and good decisions to find new customers and new applications. I welcome such opportunities.”

“If we have political leadership, a good work force and good research, this is going to be a good place to be,” Horvath said. “A lot of important factors are in place for photonics to grow in Colorado.”

Photonics: What is it?

Photonics is the science and technology of generating and controlling the flow of photons, or light particles. It is the optical equivalent of electronics, and the two technologies coexist in such innovations as optoelectronic integrated circuits.

Photonic applications include data storage by using optical disks and holograms, data transmission by using fiber-optics, optical switches and light modulators for signal processing and interconnection, even a photonic gyroscope that has no moving parts used in commercial aircraft.

Photonics is put to use in an array of applications encountered every day, including bar code scanners, remote control devices, holographic art, laser shows, in laser surgery and tattoo removal.

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