The Silicon Forest could be getting its first IPO in more than a decade.

Clark County laser manufacturer nLight filed late Friday to sell stock to the public. It would be the region's first public offering from a tech company since Cascade Microtech's IPO in 2004.

The prospective IPO represents a milestone for nLight, a nearly 20-year-old company that is enjoying enormous growth thanks to rapid advances in laser technology. It's also a major development for the Silicon Forest, which hasn't produced a truly big technology company in generations.

Some companies that seek IPOs never complete the process, which can take months. Sometimes investors lose interest when they get a close look at a company's financial results, and other times companies get too hot and a larger corporation swoops in to buy them.

Friday's filing suggests nLight can stand on its own. The company has more than 1,000 employees at sites around the world and reported sales of $138.5 million last year, up 36 percent from 2016. Profits totaled $1.8 million, compared to a $14.2 million loss the prior year.

In addition to its headquarters and factory just north of Vancouver, nLight has a factory in Finland and packaging and assembly facilities in Hillsboro and Shanghai. The company said it hopes to list on the Nasdaq Global Market under the ticker symbol LASR.

Its filing says nLight is looking to sell up to $86.3 million in stock, with the caveat that its proposed offering price is a placeholder for calculating its registration fee. Chief executive Scott Keeney, nLight's co-founder, declined comment Friday citing regulatory restrictions on public comments from companies seeking a public offering.

Though nLight has grown to become one of the biggest tech companies in the Portland area, it's not widely known.

That may be partly due to its status as a throwback to the Silicon Forest's roots in hardware manufacturing. Most of the region's young companies focus on software or web technologies. Additionally, nLight's location in the suburbs north of Vancouver is off the radar for many Portland techies.

Founded in 2000 and originally based in Seattle, nLight initially sought to build lasers to amplify communications signals on fiber-optic networks. The company built its factory near Vancouver to capitalize on the region's semiconductor industry and what was, at the time, a booming local sector for telecom services.

A telecom downturn accompanied the dot-com bust, however, and so nLight retooled to emphasize manufacturing tools. Its transition took off as laser technology advanced at a rate the company compares to Moore's Law, the famous maxim the forecast advances in the semiconductor industry.

Those advances have led to a rapid decline in the cost of producing high-output lasers. Manufacturers use nLight's tools for industrial, aerospace, defense and electronics production, displacing conventional tools.

On Friday, nLight said its big customers include major manufacturers Samsung, BAE and Raytheon. Two-thirds of nLight's sales are outside North America, with 40 percent of its revenue coming from China.

The Clark County company had previously raised $170 million - its largest shareholders include Oak Investment Partners, Menlo Ventures and Mohr, Davidow Ventures, investment firms that each hold about 20 percent of the company's stock.

Former Washington Gov. Gary Locke, who also served as President Obama's secretary of commerce and then as U.S. ambassador to China, sits on nLight's board.

The market for industrial lasers is booming. A Washington County laser company, Electro Scientific Industries, expects revenue to more than double this year to $360 million.

A Massachusetts company called IPG Photonics Corp., which nLight identifies as its biggest competitor in Friday's filing, reported 40 percent growth in sales last year to $1.4 billion. Its share price has nearly doubled in the past 12 months.

Tech companies across the U.S. are rushing into the IPO market at their fastest rate in years, capitalizing on the booming stock market and renewed investor enthusiasm for public offerings.

The nLight filing is the third from a Washington state company this week alone. Bellevue-based Smartsheet filed for an IPO on Monday; DocuSign -- which is technically based in California but has its major office in Seattle -- filed on Wednesday.

In Portland tech, though, the IPO market has been dormant for 14 years.

"It's been a long time. Everyone said: Gee, what's wrong?" said Gerry Langeler, a longtime Oregon tech investor and co-founder of Mentor Graphics.

The Silicon Forest's IPO drought reflects a long dry spell for homegrown tech companies. The region struggled to make the transition from its roots in hardware, which produced several IPOs beginning in the 1970s, to software and web services.

During that time, several companies talked about pursuing an IPO, including Viewpoint Construction Software, Integra Telecom and Tripwire. None of those, though, reached the scale or profitability required to test the public markets.

In recent years, the region has produced several fast-growing companies specializing in software and online technologies. A handful, such as Elemental Technologies and Puppet, became major local employers. But they haven't gone the IPO route - either selling to a larger company (Amazon bought Elemental in 2015) or staying private.

While such companies can still have a major regional impact, Langeler said it's good to see nLight testing the public markets. It reflects the emergence of a new generation of big, local company - and more than that, a new generation of leaders.

Publicly traded companies tend to stay local, Langeler said, and contribute more to the community than those that sell to new owners. So he said nLight's prospective IPO is heartening.

"I take it as a really good sign," Langeler said. "It emboldens others. Going public is scary. Being in the public fishbowl is tough. It's good to have role models."

This article has been updated with additional comment and context.

-- Mike Rogoway; Twitter: @rogoway; 503-294-7699