VC funded companies normally die with much less fanfare than when they are born or are taken public. Collinear Corporation (Santa Clara, CA; www.collinear.com) is no exception and has gone quietly into never-never land without a formal announcement. Its failure came to Insight Media’s attention through an announcement of an on-line auction liquidating some of its laser fab equipment. The auction is run by GoIndustry-DoveBid, Inc., who "For more than 60 years has helped corporations, government agencies and financial institutions get maximum value for their capital assets by conducting thousands of industry-specific auctions to sell millions of individual lots - representing billions of dollars in assets."

Matt Brennesholtz
Insight Media Analyst

Click here for details of the auction. Equipment sold includes high end etching & deposition systems by PlasmaLab; polishers, spectrophotometers, electronic test and measurement equipment by Advantest, Tektronix & HP; tube furnaces; temperature chambers; microscopes; wire bonders, plant support, lab support, etc. If you are interested in this equipment, you are too late: the auction started July 1st and ended July 2nd.

This equipment, however, does not represent all of Collinear’s assets. In addition to other equipment not in the auction, Collinear has significant IP. They currently have 4 issued patents and 3 published patent applications. They also have 5 international applications at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), at least one of which does not match a published or issued US application.

Collinear was a successor to Phaseon Corporation and had intended to build high-power laser sources for projection displays based on non-linear wavelength conversion. The company had been in stealth mode and little had been known about its technology other than it used Lithium Tantalate (LiTaO3) as a non-linear optical material. This material has certain theoretical advantages over the more common Lithium Niobate (LN), in particular a higher damage threshold allowing higher-powered lasers with more efficient wavelength conversion. On the other hand, LN technology is much more fully developed, in part due to its sales of millions of pieces into the telecom market.

Reportedly, Collinear was targeting its lasers at the middle of the market for applications such as RPTV. As the RPTV market has collapsed, this particular market for lasers has collapsed, too. While there are other major projection markets for lasers, lasers do not have the breadth of available markets the LED industry has. Therefore projection laser developments must be much more closely targeted toward specific applications and, if that application folds, any company targeting that application too closely is likely to fold, too.

This article will be expanded for the August issue of Large Display Report as more details become available.