Business briefs

31 Mar 2006

Including news from JPSA, OmniVision Technologies, Vertilas, Chi Mei Optoelectronics and more.

General company news:

•  JPSA of the US, a maker of laser systems for micromachining and wafer processing, has purchased a 35,000 sq. ft. facility in Manchester, New Hampshire, and plans to relocate once renovation is complete. The company says the acquisition is part of its plan for long-term growth. The new facility will feature a class 10,000 cleanroom and laser servicing facilities.

•  OmniVision Technologies, US, has been selected by automotive expert Hella KGaA Hueck to supply CMOS image sensors for Hella's rearview cameras. The product will include an integrated camera with an aperture of greater than 120 degrees, enabling the whole area behind the vehicle to be in the field of view.

•  Gamma Scientific's Highway-Safety Division and Advance Retro Technology, both of the US, have merged to create RoadVista. The partners say that RoadVista is the largest and most comprehensive supplier of retroreflection-measurement instrumentation on the market.

•  Global-Tech Appliances and Anwell Technologies have agreed to form a joint venture to produce OLED systems. The new company will be called Lite Array and will have manufacturing facilities in China.

Funding:

•  The West Penn Power Sustainable Energy Fund, US, has invested $500,000 in Pennsylvania-based firm Plextronics. The cash will help the firm develop its Plexcore HIL technology for solid-state light applications. The product is an organic, non-acidic, solvent-based hole injection layer for use in OLEDs.

•  Vertilas of Germany, a developer of long-wavelength VCSELs, has raised EURO 3.6 million (US$4.38 million) in its third round of venture capital funding. "The financing grants us the liquidity necessary to start mass producing our customer's innovative products that use our lasers," said Gerald Vollnhals, managing director of Vertilas.

•  Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have received $1.6 million in funding from the US National Institutes of Health to develop a biosensor over the next four years. "Our aim is to develop a new type of instrument that can do both electrical and optical sensing of single biomolecules, with all the sensor's components integrated onto a chip," said Holger Schmidt from UCSC.

Patent news:

•  The Tokyo District court has ruled in favour of Chi Mei Optoelectronics (CMO) in a patent dispute between the Taiwanese firm and Semiconductor Energy Labs (SEL) of Japan. The dispute was over SEL's electrostatic discharge protection patent (JP3241708) for use in LCDs. The court judged that CMO was not infringing SEL's patent and also declared SEL's patent invalid. SEL was ordered to pay CMO ¥ 10 million (US$85200) and 90% of the court costs.

•  Nanometrics of the US, a supplier of metrology equipment to the semiconductor industry, has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Nova Measuring Instruments. Nanometrics claims that Nova is infringing its US patent covering ultraviolet reflectometry measurements.