Lumentum Brand Guidelines: JDSU’s 2015 Spin-Off, Oclaro, NeoPhotonics & Marvell

A garage laser maker, an Ottawa optics firm and a split.

Lumentum is a young name with an older family tree. It was created in 2015 from JDS Uniphase, or JDSU, the optical-networking and test company that had itself been built from two firms. English Wikipedia says Uniphase was started in 1979 in a San Jose garage by former Spectra-Physics employees and made lasers for chip makers and scanners, and that JDS Optics was founded in Ottawa in 1981, later becoming JDS Fitel through a partnership with the fibre-optic and connector company Fitel. The two merged in 1999 to form JDS Uniphase, which grew through further purchases during the telecom boom and was later headquartered in Milpitas, California.

In 2015 JDSU split in two. Its Communications and Commercial Optical Products segment, known inside the company as CCOP, became Lumentum Holdings, which began operating as an independent company on 1 August 2015; its shares began regular trading on Nasdaq under the ticker LITE on 4 August, Lumentum announced on 3 August 2015. The same day, the remaining JDSU businesses — network enablement, service enablement and optical security products — announced that they had been renamed VIAVI Solutions.

At the split Lumentum gave its headquarters as Milpitas; by 2021 its releases named San Jose, which the company still gives as its base. Its first release as an independent company described a business selling optical components and subsystems for telecom, enterprise and data-centre networks, and commercial lasers for manufacturing and 3D sensing; weeks before the split, in June 2015, JDSU had shown its high-precision lasers at the LASER World of PHOTONICS trade fair, a release from that month says. On its website the company says it has been “at the intersection of light and innovation” for nearly five decades, counting its time inside JDS Uniphase.

Oclaro, a lost bid for Coherent, NeoPhotonics and Cloud Light.

Lumentum grew mostly by acquisition. In March 2018 it announced a deal to buy Oclaro, a maker of optical components and modules, and completed it on 10 December 2018, after receiving antitrust clearance in China that month, its releases say. In January 2021 it agreed to combine with the laser maker Coherent, but on 25 March 2021 Coherent ended that agreement and accepted a rival offer from II-VI, Lumentum announced.

Lumentum then announced a purchase of NeoPhotonics in November 2021 and completed it on 3 August 2022. Twelve days later it said it had bought IPG Photonics’ telecom transmission product lines, including the team developing digital signal processors for coherent optical links. On 30 October 2023 it announced a deal for Cloud Light Technology, a maker of high-speed optical transceivers and active optical cables for data centres, and completed it on 7 November 2023.

Its range today is split between cloud and networking products and industrial lasers, English Wikipedia says. The company’s own website groups them under data-centre, data-centre interconnect, metro, long-haul and submarine networks, industrial lasers and sensing, with VCSELs — vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers — as a separate line. The company says its VCSELs entered volume production for 3D sensing in consumer devices in 2017, and that in 2021 it stepped up output of 100G EMLs, a type of laser chip for data-centre links, made on indium phosphide. English Wikipedia also lists an optical circuit switch among its products for artificial-intelligence systems.

The company’s profile rose in 2026. English Wikipedia, citing the companies and the index providers, says Nvidia announced a strategic investment in Lumentum on 2 March 2026; that Lumentum joined the S&P 500 index on 23 March 2026; and that it entered the Nasdaq-100 on 18 May 2026.

How photonics makers present themselves.

Photonics companies sell things most people never see. Their lasers sit inside machine tools, their transceivers inside data-centre racks, and their detectors inside instruments, telescopes and physics experiments. So the way they present themselves leans on a small set of images that make light visible: a laser beam crossing a dark optical table, the glowing end of a fibre, a row of pluggable transceiver modules lined up for a switch, or a photomultiplier tube and a sensor chip photographed under studio light against black.

The catalogue matters as much as the advertisement. Many makers of optics and components publish long product catalogues of lenses, mirrors, mounts, filters, tubes and diodes, each part with a drawing, a part number and a page of specifications. That catalogue habit gives much of the sector a shared look: clean technical photography, plenty of white or black space, careful diagrams and an engineering sans or a restrained serif, with colour used sparingly, often for a single accent.

The trade shows are where the industry gathers in person. Photonics West, LASER World of PHOTONICS and OFC, the optical fibre communication conference, are among the events where companies show new lasers, modules and detectors, and their stands and press releases often borrow the same visual language of beams, fibres and glowing chips. Company histories also lean on science: makers of detectors and light sources often point to the research projects and observatories that have used their parts.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, what it has bought or sold and what it makes — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. Pending deals are described as pending, with the date they were announced.

An independent name, for now.

Lumentum’s independence may be short. On 2 November 2026 Marvell Technology and Lumentum announced a definitive agreement for Marvell to acquire Lumentum in an all-stock transaction, the two companies said in a release also carried by Light Reading. Under the plan, Lumentum shareholders would own about a third of the combined company, and Marvell’s chairman and chief executive would lead it. The deal was agreed on 2 November 2026 and had not been completed at the time of writing; the companies said they expected it to close in the first half of calendar 2028, subject to shareholder and regulatory approvals.

Until then Lumentum is run from San Jose, with Michael Hurlston as president and chief executive, according to its website. The company says it operates through “a network of R&D, manufacturing, and sales locations” around the world, and the November 2026 release lists specialised compound-semiconductor manufacturing among its strengths; the company does not list its plants on its company page, so this guide does not name them.

For a design guide, Lumentum shows how a spin-off can build a name of its own out of an older group, and then become the subject of a takeover agreement within about eleven years. Compare Coherent, whose 2021 merger agreement with Lumentum ended when it chose II-VI, and IPG Photonics, which sold Lumentum its telecom transmission lines in 2022. For this guide we use a deep teal, a warm amber and a pale grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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