Welcome to Lattice Materials' Blog!

Lattice Materials is a privately held company based in Bozeman, Montana, USA that manufactures silicon and germanium infrared lenses, blanks, windows and special machined parts as well as laser mirrors and thin film coating sources. The company was founded in 1989 and has grown to include a worldwide sales force as well as approximately 50 employees at its headquarters.

History

Lattice Materials was started in 1989 when two enterprising engineers moved to Bozeman, Montana, to start a business machining high purity silicon. The original building was an abandoned utility company workshop, and the first task was clearing out piles of garbage, patching holes in the ceiling, and boarding over broken windows until they could be properly replaced.

A few months later the first machined parts were hand delivered to the customer for their inspection and acceptance. We still make silicon parts for the same customer, and have helped them to grow and expand their business for nearly twenty years.

In the early 1990s Lattice expanded rapidly to meet the growing demand for silicon and germanium infrared optics for the first Gulf War. We added polishing capability, curve generation, and expanded our production capacity to keep pace with the growing infrared optics industry. Lattice began making thin film coating sources for semiconductor applications, data storage media, and optical coatings. We also started growing ingots using small crystal pullers and filled a niche supplying oddly specified silicon, which has since proven to be one of our most valuable capabilities.

Throughout the 1990s Lattice added equipment and innovative manufacturing processes to meet new market demands, such as semiconductor manufacturing support and novel applications for laser mirrors. We’ve shipped hundreds of thousands of laser mirrors that are used in all aspects of manufacturing: the date code on the bottom of every box of cereal, for example, was printed using a silicon laser mirror.

In the late 1990s Lattice installed large scale crystal pullers and hired an experienced engineer from the semiconductor industry, and now our growth team has over 40 years combined growth experience. Our specialty is growing ingots with tightly specified parameters; the type of ingots that no other crystal grower wants to try to grow.

Over the last decade Lattice has kept pace with the growing infrared optics industry. Our components are placed in nearly every conceivable infrared optical application – military weapons systems, security and safety cameras used by police and fire departments, laser mirrors used in surgical equipment, safety equipment for underground mining operations, and our parts fly into space on satellites.

Lattice Materials is still in the same building, but has remodeled and added manufacturing capabilities that nobody dreamed of over 20 years ago. Lattice Materials is the industry leader in machining precision silicon and germanium.

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