In the 1980s, Dr. Mears invented and demonstrated the Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifier (EDFA) with the help of members of the Optoelectronics Research Group led by Alec Gambling and David Payne.
[1] In 2001 he founded Atomera, and as CTO led the invention and development of Mears Silicon Technology (MST), a method for improving the mobility and other characteristics of semiconductor devices.
[3] Mears was awarded the PhD degree in 1987 for his thesis entitled “Development of rare-earth doped fibre lasers and amplifiers”.
[5] In 1986 and 1987, Mears co-authored two papers published in the Institute of Electrical Engineers (IEE) Journal “Electronics Letters”[6][7] entitled "Low-threshold tunable CW and Q-switched fiber laser operating at 1.55μm" and “Low-noise Erbium-doped fibre amplifier at 1.54μm”.
The firm developed the MST platform, a way to make silicon transistors to be more efficient without shrinking the manufacturing process.