Business briefs

16 Sep 2005

Including news from Zygo, LG Philips LCD, IPG Photonics, InPhase Technologies and more.

Financial results and new facilities:

•  Fiber laser developer IPG Photonics says its sales for the first half of 2005 increased by 58% and net income was up by over 200% compared with the same period in 2004. The firm puts this growth down to increased sales of its industrial and telecom products. IPG now plans to add 100 000 square feet of capacity through a plant acquisition in Germany and new building projects in the US. "In the second half of 2005, the company expects continued strong financial performance with annual revenue of over $90 million," said IPG's CFO Tim Mammen.

•  LG Philips LCD of South Korea plans to build a "back-end" module production plant in Wroclaw, Poland. The company says it will invest a total of EURO 429 million by 2011, with construction expected to begin in 2006. Mass production is scheduled for the first half of 2007 when the annual capacity is expected to be 3 million units.

•  Zygo, the US optical metrology expert, has opened a new facility in Beaverton, Oregon. The site will house the company's recently formed semiconductor process metrology group.

Contracts:

•  Cubic Defense Applications, US, has received a 15-month, $6.1 million R&D contract from DARPA as part of the agency's dynamic optical tags (DOTs) program. Cubic's DOTs allow long-range, covert two-way data exchange in combat environments. "A non-RF and visually unobservable system like DOTs is critical to make tactical operations safer," explained Cubic's CEO Gerald Dinkel.

•  KVH Industries, US, has received a $3.2 million order for its TG-6000 fiber-optic gyro based precision inertial measurement units. The order was placed by Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems and if three follow-on options are exercised, the order value could reach more than $15.8 million by 2009.

•  Synova of Switzerland, a developer of water-jet guided lasers, has received an order for its LDS300 dicing system from an undisclosed semiconductor firm based in California, US. Synova says this is the fist time its LDS300 will be deployed for low-k wafer laser dicing. The tool will be installed at the customer's fab in Malaysia later this fall.

General company news:

•  InPhase Technologies, the US holographic data storage specialist, says it will use a high-speed custom CMOS chip from Cypress Semiconductor in its commercial drives. The Cypress chip operates at 500 frames per second and will enable high-speed reading of data recorded by the InPhase holographic drive.

•  Sabeus the US sensor specialist has acquired Aragon Technologies for an undisclosed sum. Aragon develops narrow linewidth, low phase noise lasers that are immune to the frequency output instability seen when a laser operates in a harsh environment. Sabeus plans to integrate Aragon's devices into surface readout units that interrogate Sabeus' perimeter security and sub-surface sensing systems.

•  Nozomi Photonics of Japan has appointed Photline of France to distribute Nozomi's range of optical switches throughout Europe.