Business briefs

09 Jun 2006

Including news from Sofradir, Varioptic, Philips and Novaled, Quantel Medical and more.

General company news:

•  Optical networking specialist Transmode is opening a regional sales office in Toronto, Canada. The company says that the move builds on recent successes in the US and as yet unannounced wins in Canada.

•  Sofradir of France has won a EURO 5 million contract to deliver 200 of its longwave infrared (LWIR) detectors to an undisclosed customer. The Mercury LWIR sensors will be integrated into thermal infrared weapon sights. Under the agreement, Sofradir will customize and deliver 100 detectors and then produce the additional 100 units.

•  French liquid lens expert Varioptic has raised an additional EURO 1 million of investment in the second closing of its most recent funding round. This brings the total for the round to EURO 17.4 million. The participants in the round now include Dow Corporate Venture Capital, the venture-capital arm of the Dow Chemical Company.

•  Omnivision Technologies has announced that its CameraChips are being used in a tracheoscopic ventilation tube (TVT) system developed by ETView. The FDA-approved TVT has a tiny disposable video camera at its tip which allows doctors to view the insertion of an intubation tube into the patient's windpipe in real time.

•  Philips and Novaled are claiming a new record for the power efficiency of a white OLED. Their device produced 32 lm/W with color co-ordinates 0.47/0.45 and a CRI of 88 at a brightness of 1000 cd/m². The companies add that their OLED had a lifetime of 20000 hours, which is a major achievement towards commercial applications.

•  Synergetics, US, has signed a new three year agreement with Quantel Medical, France, to distribute Quantel's ophthalmic lasers in the US and Canada. The companies believe that the market for these types of lasers in the US and Canada, together with related accessories, could exceed $28 million annually.

•  Global Lighting Technologies (GLT) and Luminus Devices, both US, have formed a partnership to produce modular LED-based edge-lighting assemblies for large-screen LCD TVs. The firms are confident that they can dramatically reduce the LED count and simplify both color and thermal management by combining GLT's microlens lightguides with Luminus' photonic lattice (PhatLight) technology.

•  Samsung has developed what it claims is the world's first 1.98-inch LCD to achieve VGA resolution. The firm says that mobile phones equipped with this new display will be able to show Windows screens and documents with the same 480 x 640 pixel quality that is provided by most desktop or notebook PCs.