Ratson Morad Has Spent a Career Turning Difficult Physics Into Repeatable Manufacturing

The object in front of Ratson Morad is transparent, but the work behind it is not. An augmented-reality waveguide has to carry an image toward the eye while letting the wearer see the room, machine or street beyond it. Its optical behavior matters. So do the less cinematic questions: Can a factory reproduce it? How quickly? At what yield? At what cost? Morad, now chief executive officer of DigiLens, has spent his career living inside that gap between an invention that works and a process that keeps working.

His route to smartglasses did not begin with a headset. It began in Israel with mechanical engineering and medical imaging. At Elscint Medical Imaging, he was responsible for developing MRI systems between 1989 and 1995. It was a fitting first classroom: complex hardware, exacting physical behavior and no tolerance for casual assembly. He earned a master's degree in mechanical engineering from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and then completed business-management studies at the Technion.

That combination reads like an early clue. Morad was trained to understand a mechanism and to ask how an organization could make it useful. The pattern would travel with him through four very different technological landscapes.

Chapter oneThe factory is part of the invention

In 1995, Morad joined Applied Materials, the semiconductor-equipment company. Over seven years he held several executive positions, including vice president and general manager of a business division. The work included leading the development and commercialization of new systems for 300 mm wafers, the larger silicon format that chipmakers adopted to produce more dies per wafer. A patent from that period names him on a system architecture designed to raise throughput and reduce cost in semiconductor manufacturing equipment.

There is a specific kind of education inside a wafer fab. A process is judged not only by whether it can produce the intended structure, but by whether it can do so across a large substrate, from run to run, while coordinating chambers, robots, chemicals and time. Tiny variations become expensive. Throughput is not an accounting abstraction; it is built into the machine.

Morad took that education to Blue29 in December 2002. He served as president and chief executive of the wafer-processing startup, moving it from concept through funding and product release. KLA-Tencor acquired the company in late 2004. By July 2005, he had moved again, this time into photovoltaics as vice president of engineering and technology at Solyndra.

Chapter twoFour passes through solar

Morad's solar years are easier to understand as a sequence of manufacturing experiments than as a single industry chapter. At Solyndra, he worked on a novel cylindrical thin-film photovoltaic module. In February 2008, DayStar Technologies recruited him as president and chief operating officer, with responsibility centered on a photovoltaic production facility. His remit came in the blunt language of operations: design, construction and staffing.

In 2009 he joined Cogenra Solar as chief operating officer and vice president of research and development. The company initially pursued systems that collected both heat and electricity, then worked on high-efficiency photovoltaic modules. Patents naming Morad from this period show cells overlapping like roof shingles. The geometry reduced unused area and offered shorter electrical paths, turning a familiar physical arrangement into a tool for module efficiency.

SunPower acquired Cogenra in 2015. Morad marked the event publicly after six years with the company. He then served as chief operating officer and senior vice president of research and development at Sunpreme, where work on bifacial solar modules again joined device architecture to cost targets, reliability and production choices.

The solar sequence supplied more than subject-matter expertise. It reinforced a habit of looking at a physical product as a chain. Materials affect design. Design affects equipment. Equipment affects yield. Yield affects price. A beautiful component can still become a poor business if one link refuses to cooperate.

Chapter threeA lens that behaves like a supply chain

Morad joined DigiLens in 2017 as chief operating officer. The company works on holographic waveguides, the transparent optical components that route light from a display engine into a wearer's eye. Its process combines proprietary photopolymer materials, inkjet deposition and holographic contact copying. Rather than carve every optical feature one part at a time, the company records gratings into a material layer and uses a master to reproduce them.

The intended result has several simultaneous obligations. A waveguide must transmit the outside world with low haze. It must direct red, green and blue image light efficiently. It has to control stray light visible to other people as eye glow. It must remain thin enough for a wearable form. Then the whole stack has to submit to manufacturing.

This is where Morad's previous lives stop looking previous. Thin-film deposition recalls semiconductor and solar production. A contact-copy process raises the old questions of tooling and replication. Licensing production to a partner requires the knowledge-transfer discipline that hardware companies often discover late.

In 2024, DigiLens and Chinese optical-components manufacturer Crystal-Optech announced an upgrade to a line producing Crystal30 waveguides. Morad called the manufacturer “a transformational partner for DigiLens in scaling waveguide manufacturing” and said its team had implemented DigiLens technology within months. The significance sits inside the verb implemented. A laboratory can guard a recipe. A scalable platform has to teach it.

The operating thesisSell the capability to repeat

DigiLens' model is built around more than shipping lenses from Sunnyvale. It licenses technology and transfers production methods to manufacturing partners. That choice can expand capacity without requiring DigiLens to own every facility, but it also places unusual weight on documentation, process windows, measurement and trust. Every factory is a test of whether the underlying knowledge is truly portable.

Morad's patent record makes that emphasis visible. His name appears on work covering high-volume manufacturing of waveguides, high-throughput recording of holographic gratings, photopolymers for holographic recording and AR displays mounted to smart devices. A 2019 paper, co-authored with Jonathan Waldern and Milan Popovich for the Society for Information Display, framed waveguide manufacturing across past, present and future. The subject is not merely how light moves through glass. It is how an industry might learn to make the glass.

By 2025, patent grants and applications continued to name Morad on manufacturing systems for waveguide cells and gratings. DigiLens' current leadership page lists him as chief executive officer and a board member. The title has changed from the chief operating role he held during the Crystal-Optech announcement, but the visible agenda remains attached to scale, partnerships and production.

The move from operating chief to chief executive is notable because it puts a factory-trained perspective at the top of the company. In physical technology, strategy eventually encounters a tolerance: the brightness a material can support, the speed a tool can hold, the defect rate a customer will accept. Morad has spent decades working where those limits become schedules and budgets. At DigiLens, the chief executive's problem is broader than a single production line, yet it still resolves into concrete choices about which optical improvements to pursue, which partners can reproduce them, and which applications justify the work. The role may be corporate. The decision-making material remains physical.

What survivesThe future arrives through boring consistency

Smartglasses attract grand predictions because they place computing directly in the field of view. Morad's biography offers a useful counterweight to the spectacle. Before a device can feel ordinary, its production must become ordinary. Materials arrive within specification. Machines hold alignment. Yield stops swinging. A partner on another continent produces the same optical behavior. None of this looks like the future in a product video. All of it determines whether the future can be delivered.

His career also shows why hardware experience compounds in non-obvious ways. MRI systems, wafer tools, solar modules and holographic lenses do not share a customer or a form factor. They share the unforgiving nature of matter. Software can be copied with near-perfect fidelity. A physical process negotiates each time with temperature, chemistry, surfaces, equipment and people.

The operator's task is to narrow that negotiation until the result becomes dependable. Morad has been doing versions of that work since 1989. The current object happens to be a thin, transparent waveguide, designed to put digital information into the world without blocking the world itself. Behind the glass is the same old puzzle, now sharpened to an optical edge: make the difficult thing, then make the method teachable, repeatable and economical enough to matter.