Business briefs

05 Nov 2004

Including news from Corning, Lumileds, Philips, Cree and more.

General company news:

•  A Japanese court has dismissed the patent infringement lawsuit that Furukawa Electric had filed against Corning Cable Systems. Furukawa had claimed that optical fibers sold by Corning infringed a Furukawa patent covering a specific design of optical fiber ribbon cable.

•  Lumileds Lighting, US, has joined forces with Philips of the Netherlands to produce modular LED components for the automotive industry. The modules will use Lumileds' Luxeon technology while Philips will lend its design, development and integration expertise. The first products are expected to hit the market in 2005.

•  XTREME Technologies, a joint venture between Jenoptik and Lambda Physik, says it has produced 50W of intermediate focus power at 13.5 nm - the highest output power from an extreme ultraviolet (EUV) source. The result was announced at the EUV lithography symposium being held in Miyazaki, Japan, this week.

•  Cree says that its XLamp 7090 white LED product has achieved the highest commercially-available brightness in the industry: 40-60 lumens at 350 mA. Now available in sample quantities, Cree expects production volumes to be available in December 2004.

•  Optical Surfaces has supplied two ultra-high precision mirrors to the Atomic Weapons Establishment, UK, to help upgrade the performance of its HELEN terawatt laser facility. Both mirrors were 270 mm diameter off-axis paraboloids with a focal length of 600 mm and a surface accuracy of lambda / 10.

•  Semrock, a US developer of optical filters, has been awarded US patent number 6,809,859 which covers the construction of its BrightLine series of fluorescence filters. The filters use Semrock's thin-film technology where a high layer count is said to add to the filter's performance.

Contracts:

•  The US Department of Defense has awarded contracts totalling $22.2 million to 21 organizations for research into high-energy laser technology. The one and two-year contracts are expected to yield advances in the way laser light is aimed at targets to be destroyed, optics for managing high-power beams as well as improvements in various lasers including chemical, fiber, free electron and solid-state.

•  Optimum Optical Systems, US, has received a follow-on contract for the lens assembly inside the infrared mast-mounted sight on the US Army's Kiowa Warrior helicopters. The total value of the contract amounts to $2.8 million.

•  Opticology, US, has won a Phase I STTR award to develop an optical method for measuring the osmorality of a tear. Tear osmolarity measures the presence and degree of Dry Eye Syndrome however the procedure is not widely used due to the lack suitable equipment. The value of the award was not disclosed.