Quantex Corp has formed Photonex Corp in Rockville, Maryland to exploit its patented optical technology. Although there are sceptics, the most notable being IBM, unless it is simply trying to put all its competitors worldwide off the scent, it is difficult to believe that within 10 or 15 years, much computing won’t be done optically rather than electronically as more and more optical components take over the speed-critical functions within computers, and Photonex has been formed to develop and market hardware for the optical processing market.Needless to say, the military are at the front of the queue for optical processing components, and Quantex has received almost $1.5m in funding from the US Air Force and the Strategic Defense Initiative Office to demonstrate feasibility and to support early materials. As a first step, Quantex is looking at parallel applications, reporting that parallel processing is inherent in its optical materials, and the company is planning to offer subsystems and systems to overcome bottlenecks in electronic systems. It sees the packaged optical subsystems and systems it plans to introduce being used in neural networks, pattern recognition and industrial process control. The key technology is a spatial light modulator that applies Quantex’s electron-trapping materials, compounds of Group II and Group VI elements from the Periodic Table. These have the property of storing light energy which can be released in the form of light when stimulated by infra-red command photons. The material is inherently parallel because the entire incoming image or data field is recorded in one, as with a photograph, and the data can be modified by successive exposures, and fields of data can be added to, subtracted from and multiplied into an existing stored image data field – all at the speed of light. The company’s initial venture capital came from Teknoinvest, a Norwegian financial group. Head of Photonex is Dr Joseph Lindmayer, who was in on the early development of transistors and integrated circuits at Sprague Electric, worked for Comsat, and founded Solarex Corp and Quantex Corp.
