CyOptics (Los Angeles, CA), a maker of fiberoptic components, will be demonstrating its new technology for high-speed transmission at the Optical Fiber Communication conference 2000 (March 5-10; Baltimore, MD). The company is developing indium phosphide (InP) based components for optical networking; at the heart of the technology is a pulse-generating laser, a device for which CyOptics has received a patent.

Barely a year old, CyOptics has received $7 million in venture-capital financing. It is incorporated in Delaware and has a manufacturing subsidiary in Haifa, Israel. The Haifa branch is actually a pre-existing semiconductor fabrication facility (fab) used only partially by CyOptics; a portion of the fab's floor space contains CyOptics equipment. This arrangement is what allowed CyOptics to get a fab up and running so quickly, says Hava Volterra, vice president of marketing and business development. The company incorporates silicon optical-bench (SiOB) technology into its devices and buys the SiOB components from European sources.—John Wallace