Dalsa buys medical imager MedOptics
Dalsa Corp. (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada) will acquire MedOptics Corp. (Tucson, AZ) for $4.5 million in a deal to be closed January 2000. The purchase price includes intangible assets of approximately $4 million, primarily technology rights and in-process research-and-development costs, which Dalsa expects to amortize over a period of 12 to 18 months. Dalsa makes high-performance charge-coupled-device sensors and cameras used for industrial vision applications as well as medical imaging. Founded in 1994, MedOptics has 16 employees and specializes in digital x-ray medical imaging cameras for high-resolution, small-field radiographic applications such as breast biopsy. MedOptics anticipates 1999 revenues of $4.5 million.
DRS Hadland acquires IMCO Electro Optics
DRS Hadland Ltd. (Tring, England) has bought the business and assets of IMCO Electro Optics Ltd. (Basildon, England). Both companies make ultrahigh-speed cameras and imaging systems. A subsidiary of DRS Technologies (Parsippany, NJ), DRS Hadland has been collaborating with IMCO under a European distribution agreement. The acquisition of IMCO boosts DRS Hadland's rapid-prototyping capability. DRS Hadland will continue to operate from its Tring site, as well as from its other locations in Cupertino, CA, and Munich, Germany. Former IMCO managing director Mark Riches will become DRS Hadland's technical director.
New FED company aims at flat-panel TV market
Printable Field Emitters (PFE) Ltd. (Didcot, England) has demonstrated a video-rate, 32 x 32-pixel, cold-cathode field-emission display (FED) with the performance features needed for flat-panel TV applications. PFE was founded just over four years ago, initially with funding for a student at Aston University (Birmingham, England). This funding, from a handful of business angels, was topped by a contract with a UK company to develop a small prototype. The breakthrough in funding came in June 1998 when 3i invested £2 million ($3.2 million) in PFE, allowing the company to set about exploiting its technology. It now operates out of a 3000-sq ft facility, which it leases from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot, employing about 11 technical staff. CEO Andy Harding says the company is in discussion with potential licensees.
Nitres wins DARPA contract for UV arrays
Nitres (Westlake, CA) has been awarded a $1.4 million contract by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA; Washington, DC) to develop UV solar-blind focal-plane arrays. The contract is procured through the Air Force Materiel Command (Hanscom AFB; Bedford, MA). Potential applications of the arrays include chemical-pollution monitoring, biological sensing systems, and the monitoring of human UV exposure from the Sun's radiation. The award is a result of Nitres' experience with gallium nitride-based UV photodetectors.
Video Display Corp. buys IR technology from EEV
Cathode-ray-tube maker Video Display Corp. (VDC; Tucker, GA) has signed an asset purchase and license agreement with EEV (Elmsford, NY) for rights to certain IR camera-tube technology and inventory. Video Display Corp. will buy EEV's inventory of raw and finished stock as well as manufacturing equipment. In addition, VDC will receive an exclusive worldwide license to EEV's intellectual property and will fulfill all outstanding sales orders now booked at EEV and take over the IR Leddicon product line. Manufacturing and sales of the IR tubes will be transferred to VDC's Teltron division (Birdsboro, PA).
Also in the news . . .
NanoScience Corp. (Oxford, CT) won an SBIR grant from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (Greenbelt, MD) to develop high-gain, low-noise, silicon microchannel-plate technology. . . . STMicroelectronics (Geneva, Switzerland) is buying Arithmos (Santa Clara, CA), a developer of ICs for digital displays, in a deal that will likely be concluded in December 2000. . . . Universal Display Corp. (Ewing, NJ) received a $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop color displays based on stacked organic light-emitting-device technology.
John Wallace