Business briefs
17 Jun 2002
Including news from Heptagon, Spectra-Physics, Nichia, Toyoda Gosei and Suss MicroTec.
The Tokyo District Court has ruled that
Toyoda Gosei did not infringe on two patents held by
Nichia concerning the manufacture of blue LEDs. According to Japan's business newspaper
Nikkei, the court said in its ruling that Nichia's patents do not cover the active layer structure and materials in Toyoda Gosei's LED chips.
Finland-based
Heptagon has moved into a new facility in Switzerland, expanding its total production operation to 300 m2. Having also upgraded its characterization equipment, Heptagon will now ramp-up production of its microlens arrays.
Spectra-Physics and
NP Photonics, both of the US, have teamed-up to produce a new class of miniaturized, optical-fiber-based amplifiers for telecoms applications. The product will be based on NP Photonics' proprietary erbium-doped glass. Spectra-Physics is to contribute design and manufacturing capabilities as their part of the agreement.
Nichia of Japan claims to have developed a high-power indium gallium nitride (InGaN) LED with ten times the electrical power of similar models. With an increased InGaN chip area of 1 mm2, the devices are housed in heat- and UV-resistant packages and can be installed using standard automated assembly methods.
Suss MicroTec of Germany, a developer of microelectronics, has joined forces with
Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration (IZM) to evaluate technologies for failure analysis and wafer testing. The partnership will establish a submicron probing demonstration center at the IZM facility in Munich.
