Daily News Briefs

Steve Norgaard has joined nLight, a Vancouver, Wash., manufacturer of high-power semiconductor diode lasers, as vice president of manufacturing operations. Norgaard was formerly regional quality director at Applied Materials Inc. and was previously vice president of operations at New Focus Inc. . . . Radiant Imaging and Royal Philips Electronics have entered into a licensing agreement to commercialize a surface appearance inspection device based on Philips' imaging scatterometer technology. They said the device, called the Parousiameter, is particularly useful for characterizing the appearance angle-of-view dependent reflective surfaces, such as metals, textured surfaces, interference effect lacquers and even holographic surfaces. The companies said it costs less and is faster than traditional scatterometers, such as goniophotometers and spot photometers, because it collects all view angles in a single measurement. Under the terms of the agreement, Radiant Imaging will build and sell instruments based on Philips technology and will develop data acquisition and image processing software that will be licensed back to Philips. Radiant Imaging, of Duvall, Wash., makes imaging systems for light and color measurement and illumination engineering tools and services.