Iolon, inc.

About Iolon, inc.

Iolon, Inc. operated as a designer and manufacturer of tunable optical devices and lasers for the fiber-optic networking industry. The company was founded in 2001 and established its headquarters in San Jose, California. Iolon's founder, Hal Jerman, was a veteran of the MEMS industry, and the company's technology was built upon his expertise in using deep reactive ion etch (DRIE) to create rigid and reliable micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) actuators from pure silicon. John Clark joined as president, CEO, and chairman in late 2000.

The company's business model centered on supplying high-performance tunable components to providers of optical networking systems. These devices were designed to be used in products that transmit, monitor, and receive optical signals within these networks, enabling applications like rapid provisioning and bandwidth on demand. Iolon's primary product line was the Apollo, a tunable external-cavity laser (ECL) that combined MEMS actuators, micro-optics, and advanced servo control. This design allowed the Apollo lasers to be tuned across the entire C-band and L-band, offering performance comparable to fixed-wavelength lasers but with the added flexibility of tunability. The product portfolio also included optical switches, polarization controllers, tunable filters, and spectral monitors. Key clients included optical networking system providers like Lucent Technologies and Innovance Networks, who integrated Iolon's lasers into their dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM) systems to reduce operational costs and increase network capacity.

Iolon was a product of the dot-com bubble, raising over $85 million in capital from prominent investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Corning, Seagate Technology, and Boston Millennia Partners. Despite its technological advancements and securing multi-million dollar contracts, the company struggled when the telecommunications market contracted. This downturn led to a situation described as a "price-volume trap". In November 2005, the laser and photonics company Coherent, Inc. acquired all of Iolon's assets for $5 million in cash. Coherent was interested in Iolon's packaging technology and intellectual property to enhance its own product lines for instrumentation and display markets, rather than continuing in the telecom market. In 2006, Luna Innovations (then Luna Technologies) acquired the rights from Coherent to manufacture and sell a version of the Apollo laser, which it rebranded as the "Phoenix" for use in fiber optic test and measurement and sensing applications.