News

26 March 2009

 

Thorlabs acquires Covega from Gemfire

Photonics component maker Thorlabs Inc of Newton, NJ has acquired optoelectronic component and subsystem maker Covega Corp of Jessup, MD from Gemfire Corp.

Founded in 1999 as Codeon Corp before changing its name in 2003, Covega is a vertically integrated manufacturer of proprietary gain chips, semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) and other indium phosphide (InP) based components and modules as well as lithium niobate (LiNbO3) technology.

Gemfire acquired Covega in February 2008. However, Gemfire says that it now wants to focus more on its integrated optical components and sub-systems (based on photonic lightwave circuits) for telecom and defense-related applications, which it makes at its headquarters in Fremont, CA, USA and in Livingston, Scotland, UK (formerly silica-on-silicon firm Kymata).

Also, last November, Gemfire ran short of cash in the wake of the stock market crash after a new investor decided against providing funding and a couple of large customers pushed out their orders (leading it to close its plants temporarily for two weeks).

“Covega comes to the Thorlabs family with a new suite of optical technologies that Thorlabs looks forward to offering to its diverse customer base,” says Thorlabs’ president & founder Alex Cable.

Covega's management team consists of industry veterans with experience from Lucent Technologies, Nortel Networks, Newport Corp, US Naval Research Laboratory, Motorola, Honeywell, Bosch Telecom, and Optelecom. The firm’s technology team includes pioneers in high-power lasers, optical amplifiers, and LiNbO3 modulators, and expertise includes materials, device design, wafer growth and fabrication, processing, advanced E/O device packaging, manufacturing, and system engineering. Covega has a 40,000ft² facility in central Maryland (including 18,000ft² of class 100 and 10,000 cleanroom facilities) capable of producing high-performance optical devices and modules designed for of a diverse customer base.

Covega's LiNbO3 technology (on both x-cut and z-cut wafers) offers a family of Telcordia-compliant external optical intensity and phase modulators (including 10Gb/s and 40Gb/s zero-chirp and fixed-chirp intensity modulators, 10Gb/s modulators integrated with variable optical attenuators, modulators integrated with drivers, and chirp-controlled phase modulators). Intensity modulators are based on Mach-Zehnder interferometers and are fabricated using titanium-indiffused LiNbO3 substrates fabricated in-house. Modulators for emerging telecom applications, such as dual quadrature phase shift key modulation (DQPSK), are in development, and early samples are available.

Covega's single angle facet (SAF) gain chip solution is a high-power InP active waveguide gain element for external-cavity tunable lasers that provides broad bandwidth, high power, and stable operation.

Based on highly efficient multi-quantum well structures and proven six-sigma-based chip fabrication processes, the firm's InP-based SOA products offer high-saturation power, high gain over a broad spectral bandwidth, and low noise figure (suiting use in communication systems, instrumentation, photonics sensors, scientific applications, and fiber-optic gyros).

InP products - including booster optical amplifiers (BOAs), Fabry–Perot Lasers, broad-area lasers, and superluminescent diodes (SLD) - are designed for use in the 1050-1850nm spectral range, typically for telecoms, medical instrumentation, and sensor applications.

Consequently, after Covega's early focus on the telecom, datacom, and cable TV industries, more than a third of revenues now come from the defense, medical, industrial, sensing, test & measurement, and instrumentation industries.

Covega also provides fab-lite and fabless customers with turnkey vertically integrated InP and LiNbO3 foundry services, including device design and modeling, wafer growth, chip and module fabrication, and E/O device packaging.

“We are committed to ensuring continued access to the broad array of products that Covega currently manufactures,” promises Thorlabs’ president Alex Cable.

See related item:

Gemfire and Covega merge

Search: Gemfire SOAs InP

Visit: www.covega.com

Visit: www.thorlabs.com