Stellar Industries Corp. was formed in 1985 to introduce exciting new thermally conductive aluminum nitride ceramics into the microelectronics world. From its early days as an exclusive distributor for this product line to Norton Corporation in a co-venture agreement with Toshiba, Stellar Industries evolved into developing manufacturing techniques for machining and metalization of this unique ceramic. To survive the early years where there was more curiosity about aluminum nitride than buyers, Stellar added custom-made aluminum oxide and beryllium oxide ceramic products to its product line. With the explosion of the Telecom Industry, new opportunities for thermally conductive materials and IGBT high current high-power semiconductors became available. Stellar developed applications using the new Dupont thick film AlN pastes for a series of custom detector submounts for laser applications. Stellar also established thin film capabilities to deposit Titanium/Platinum/ Gold and Gold-Tin films on submounts for high power laser diodes that grew exponentially before the Telecom Crash in 2000. To meet the demands of power hybrids, Stellar employed Direct Bond Copper (DBC) technology to clad pure copper to ceramics using a copper oxide bond. Originally licensed from Harris Corporation from the original GE patents, Joe Dickson at Tegman was instrumental in helping Stellar establish a DBC line to be a second source to GE’s spinoff.