It isn't easy to make a really good blue laser diode, the kind you'd want in a Blu-ray player or game machine. Not only do you have to make it out of gallium nitride, you need to start with a near-perfect crystal of the same stuff, to serve as a foundation, or substrate. Problem is, such crystals are not found in nature, and the conventional way of making them tends to load the product with defects.
Now comes Ammono, a tiny firm in Warsaw that has marked a trail all its own by growing gallium-nitride crystals under extraordinary pressure and heat. The company's focus on this method owes something to the study of how rock crystal, made of quartz, forms in the hellish bowels of the earth (a field of study pioneered by Poles, by the way). Already the company claims fewer defects per unit of area than are found in the best crystals formed by conventional vapor deposition.
What remains to be done is to scale up the crystals so a lot of laser diodes can be fabricated on each one simultaneously. Today Ammono's biggest crystals measure some 2 inches along their longest axis, but the company expects to expand to 4 inches. That should be enough to attract the eyes of the mammoth semiconductor makers, to which which it hopes to license its technology.