OTTAWA, ONTARIO, CANADA-Enablence Technologies has acquireD all of the outstanding shares of Albis Optoelectronics AG (Rüschlikon, Switzerland) for $4.1 million in cash and stock. The Swiss manufacturer of photodiodes will continue to supply products to the datacom and FTTH markets as a wholly owned subsidiary of Enablence. Peter Cairoli will continue as president and managing director of Albis.
“As a subsidiary of Enablence, Albis will provide us with a portfolio of leading-edge photodiode product lines, a diversified worldwide customer base, a fab capable of shipping 10 million chips per year, and a presence in the European marketplace,” said Arvind Chhatbar, CEO of Enablence.
According to Chhatbar, the two companies had been working together “for a while now” as Enablence sought photodetectors that would integrate well with the FTTH transceivers it had designed based on its dispersion bridge technology. Chhatbar cited Albis’s high-performance products, in-house fab capabilities, and profitable business as strengths that Enablence found enticing.
While the pairing of the companies’ capabilities might lend themselves to work toward a monolithic transceiver design, Chhatbar said that Enablence’s current hybrid integration approach adequately meets both internal and market requirements. Therefore, he said he is not entirely convinced that a monolithic approach is necessary in the near term.
According to the press release announcing the deal, Albis Optoelectronics is an ISO9001:2000 certified designer, developer, and manufacturer of high-speed single channel and array photodiode chips for fiber-optic datacom and telecom applications. Its product portfolio is designed to support 2.5-, 4-, 10- and 40-Gbit/sec communication links as well as analog microwave applications. The Zurich-based fabrication facilities offer full in-house production from front-end to back-end and include a class 100 clean room and extensive test and qualification laboratories. Markus Blaser and Joerg Wieland founded the company in August 2003 after acquiring all of the assets associated with the photodiode business line of OptoSpeed.
Interviewed at Tokyo’s the Fiber Optic Expo this past January, Albis CEO Peter Cairoli reported that the company had just released its GaAs product line. He also revealed that 40% of the company’s revenues came from Japan, with PON, 10GBase-LRM, and parallel optics representing strong applications. In addition, he noted that photodiodes for monitoring TOSA performance had proven to be a big product.
-Stephen Hardy, editorial director, Lightwave
