Company

Freedom Photonics LLC based in Santa Barbara, California is a wholly owned subsidiary of Luminar (Nasdaq: LAZR). The company was founded in 2005, with a vision to commercialize advanced semiconductor photonic component technology. We specialize in unique and innovative photonic components, modules and subsystems for a variety of applications. Our world-class technical team has a wealth of experience in successful design, development and volume manufacturing of semiconductor lasers, photodetectors and high-functionality, high performance photonic IC based products. Besides our standard off-the-shelf products, we supply many customers with private label and white label photonic products.

We operate from a 21,000 square foot manufacturing facility. Our facility contains multiple cleanrooms, for both manufacturing and engineering, and a full range of equipment needed for test, assembly and packaging of our products.

Our quality management system is registered to ISO-9001:2015 with NSF-ISR.

Dr. Milan L. Mashanovitch

Dr. Milan L. Mashanovitch

President

Dr. Mashanovitch is the President of Freedom Photonics.

Dr. Mashanovitch has 20 years of experience working in the field of photonics, spanning over design, fabrication, testing and packaging of photonic integrated circuits, combined with 10 years of management and business development experience.

Prior to Freedom Photonics, Dr. Mashanovitch has worked at the University of California Santa Barbara as a Scientist, on photonic integrated circuits in Indium Phosphide, as well as an Adjunct Professor teaching graduate level classes on semiconductor lasers and photonic ICs.

Dr. Mashanovitch has co-authored ~ 150 papers, many invited, on photonic integrated circuits and various photonic devices. He holds 9 patents, and has co-authored the second edition of the “Diode Lasers and Photonic Integrated Circuits” textbook. He is very active in the photonics technical community, participating on technical committees of many conferences. He is a Senior Member of IEEE.

Dr. Mashanovitch holds a dipl. ing. Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Belgrade in Serbia, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California in Santa Barbara.

Dr. Leif A. Johansson

Dr. Leif A. Johansson

Vice President of Technology

Dr. Johansson is the Vice President of Technology at Freedom Photonics.

Dr. Johansson has 20 years of experience related to photonic integrated circuits, widely tunable lasers, radio-frequency photonics, analog optical communications, radio over fiber systems and coherent optical communications. This work has resulted in a number of novel concepts and record results in the area of RF and coherent photonic ICs.Before Freedom Photonics, Dr. Johansson has been involved in the development of RF photonic devices and subsystems at University of California, Santa Barbara and at Agility Communications (now Lumentum).

Leif has authored or co-authored over 220 publications in the areas of RF photonics and photonic integrated circuits, and has given numerous invited and contributed talks at various international conferences. He has chaired, serves or has served on technical committees for IEEE Microwave Photonics Conference, Optical Fiber Communications Conference, IEEE Photonics Conference.

Dr. Johansson has received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University College London, UK.

Dr. Gordon B. Morrison

Dr. Gordon B. Morrison

Vice President of Engineering

Dr. Morrison is the Vice President of Engineering at Freedom Photonics. He has more than 20 years of experience in the design and engineering of various photonic devices, including DFB lasers, tunable lasers and externally modulated DFB lasers. In addition, he has been responsible for production, testing and qualification of semiconductor laser products according to Telcordia Standards (GR 468, 63).

Before joining Freedom Photonics, he spent a number of years in various senior engineering and manufacturing roles at Avago Technologies and Cyoptics where he was responsible for improvements to the design, reliability, and manufacturability of DFB lasers and external cavity tunable lasers. Prior to that, he has worked at Apogee Photonics, where he worked on the externally modulated laser product, and contributed to wafer level process development and life-time aging analysis and qualification of semiconductor optical components.

Dr. Morrison has received his Ph.D. from McMaster University in Canada.

Kenneth A. Hay

Kenneth A. Hay

Vice President of Manufacturing

Mr. Hay is the Vice President of Manufacturing at Freedom Photonics. He is responsible for manufacturing assembly and test, new product insertion and photodetector product development. He is also responsible for maintaining quality standards related to Company’s ISO 9001:2015 certification.

Mr. Hay has over 30 years of experience in the engineering, product development and manufacturing of various infrared and photonic devices, including photodetectors, focal plane arrays and infrared cameras. Before joining Freedom Photonics, he managed both the development and manufacturing of packaged microbolometer focal plane arrays as CTO at Infraredvision Technology Corporation (ITC), which was later acquired by L3 Communications. Prior to ITC, Ken was at Raytheon-Amber, where he worked on the MWIR and LWIR high-performance imaging arrays for camera product. Over his full career, he has accumulated extensive experience in various aspects of materials and device development of II-VI and III-IV infrared detectors and arrays.

Mr. Hay has received his master’s degree in electro-optical components from University of California, Irvine, and his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from University of California Santa Barbara.