Pirelli acquires 12.4% of Avanex
The Pirelli Group (Milan, Italy) has signed an agreement with Alcatel-Lucent to acquire the 12.4% stake held by Alcatel-Lucent in Avanex at a market price of approximately $48.2 million. With this agreement Pirelli becomes the main industrial investor in Avanex, one of the major worldwide players in optical modules and components for telecommunications.
Alcatel-Lucent also signed supply agreements with both Pirelli and Avanex for related components. “The supply agreement with Alcatel-Lucent and the investment in Avanex strengthen the Group’s presence in the core business of second-generation photonics after the startup, in 2001, of the Pirelli Labs advanced research center and the incorporation in early 2005 of Pirelli Broadband Solutions,” said Claudio De Conto, general manager, operations, of Pirelli.
Enablence raises $59.7 million for FTTH
A public offering was successfully completed by Enablence Technologies (Ottawa, ON, Canada), a developer of planar lightwave circuit (PLC)-based transceivers for fiber-to-the-home (FTTH), aerospace, and defense applications. Enablence issued an aggregate of 42.6 million common shares at a price of $1.40 per share for total gross proceeds of approximately $59.7 million dollars. “This additional financing will allow Enablence to continue to consolidate its leadership position in the fiber-to-the-home industry and to expand our product lines and global operations,” announced Arvind Chhatbar, CEO of Enablence.
40 Gbit/s transmission demonstrated over POF
Discovery Semiconductors (Ewing, NJ) has provided a multimode coupled 40 Gbit/s photodiode to the University of Kiel in Germany for its research on high-speed optical communications over plastic optical fiber (POF) and multimode fiber (MMF). Researcher Stefan Schoellman demonstrated error-free 40 Gbit/s transmission over 50 m of plastic optical fiber. “MMF and POF are promising candidates for the increasing market of high-speed local area networks (LANs) and short optical interconnects in the high performance computing (HPC) environment,” said Abhay Joshi, president and CEO of Discovery Semiconductors.
Partnership targets 40 Gbit/s solution
JDSU (Milpitas, CA) formed a strategic partnership with optical transport systems company Mintera (Acton, MA) to provide a complete 40 Gbit/s solution set to the telecom industry. The partnership will combine Mintera’s dense-wavelength-division-multiplexing (DWDM) 40 Gbit/s transmission technology with JDSU’s 40 Gbit/s-capable optical communications products and test and measurement solutions.
Joint development will include a 40 Gbit/s DWDM transponder module. Mintera will also incorporate its patent-pending adaptive-differential phase-shift keying (ADPSK) technology into the transponder. ADPSK enables optimal transmission of 40 Gbit/s signals over 50 GHz channels in reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer (ROADM)-enabled optical networks, a configuration commonly used in long-haul and metro networks.
Agilent partners in Fibre Channel training
Solution Technology (Ben Lomond, CA), a technical training provider and book publishing company, and Agilent Technologies (Santa Clara, CA), announced an agreement to provide training classes for developers, integrators, and managers for Fibre Channel technology. Incorporating Agilent’s Fibre Channel test tools into Solution Technology’s training supports the theoretical elements covered in the class with practical examples, and helps illustrate the nature and challenges of this technology. Students also get the opportunity to analyze real systems with Agilent’s protocol debug tools. David Deming, president and CTO of Solution Technology said, “We chose to partner with Agilent because of its leadership in the industry, combined with Agilent’s hardware platform for Fibre Channel traffic generation and protocol analysis.”
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Also in the news . . .
360networks (Seattle, WA) has selected Infinera (Sunnyvale, CA) for its regional network in the western United States. . . . The particle physics group at University College London (UCL) chose a Polatis (Cambridge, England, and Billerica, MA) all-optical switch for a data-acquisition system test bed for data collection from a detector at the International Linear Collider, currently in development. . . . The Optoelectronics Industry Development Association (OIDA; Washington, DC) has redesigned its Web site (www.oida.org) with enhanced access to OIDA and industry information and resources with a clearer structure, simplified navigation, and improved search functions. . . . AMS Technologies (Martinsried, Germany), distributor for optoelectronics, fiber optics, high-voltage electronics, and thermal management photonic components and systems, celebrates its 25th anniversary in October 2007. . . . Sterlite Optical Technologies (Pune, India) is changing its name to Sterlite Technologies to reflect its expansion from optical fiber to telecom and energy products.