Abingdon, England, and Zurich, Switzerland — Electro-optic specialist Bookham Technology (www.bookham.com), currently headquartered in Abingdon, plans to change its corporate location to the United States in September. The change will entail an exchange of the UK shares to shares of a Delaware incorporated entity. The change was brought about by the company's expanding role from a telecommunications supplier to that of a supplier of laser products for the industrial, bio-medical and optics markets.
Bookham has facilities in Caswell and Paignton in the UK, two facilities in San Jose and one in Sunnyvale, California, an R&D facility in Ottawa, Canada, an assembly plant in Shenzhen, China, and a high-power laser chip facility in Zurich, Switzerland.
The latter has just announced that it has developed and qualified a family of high-power diode laser bars for key industrial markets. With more than 5000 hours of testing on its 50-watt, 808nm bars, bars at 60 watts have also met stringent tests and an 80-watt bar is under qualification. A 120-watt bar is planned for release later this year. Wavelengths of 780 and 1060 nm are also now available.
Applications for the high-power GaAs diode lasers include pumping solid-state lasers and direct diode applications for marking and label printing.