Laser Industry Report

Oct. 1, 2005
Teem Photonics(Grenoble, France) and JDS Uniphase (San Jose, CA) signed a definitive agreement for the sale of JDS Uniphase’s passive Q-switched microlaser product line and facility in Grenoble, France, to Teem Photonics.

JDSU to sell microlaser business

Teem Photonics(Grenoble, France) and JDS Uniphase (San Jose, CA) signed a definitive agreement for the sale of JDS Uniphase’s passive Q-switched microlaser product line and facility in Grenoble, France, to Teem Photonics.

According to the companies, the microlaser product line is differentiated by its subnanosecond pulse widths with peak powers in the tens of kilowatts and repetition rates in the tens of kilohertz, as well as by its reliance on monolithic technology. Teem Photonics and JDS Uniphase said they recognize that current customers are best served by a local owner capable of providing the Grenoble-based group more market focus, greater management attention, and improved targeting of investments

Picarro and Stanford extend license

Picarro (Sunnyvale, CA) and Stanford University (Stanford, CA) have extended an exclusive licensing agreement covering several Stanford patents on a sensing technology used in Picarro’s trace chemical detection products. The new agreement extends exclusivity on the Stanford patents for a minimum of five more years and as many as eight. It covers eight issued patents and five pending ones.

The patents cover cavity-ringdown spectroscopy (CRDS), which Stanford pioneered and Picarro developed for commercial use in a variety of applications, including identification of chemicals in industrial processes and to study critical changes in atmospheric greenhouse gases.

Alfalight awarded 1-kW diode-laser contract

Alfalight (Madison, WI) announced a research and development contract worth $4.5 million from the Army Research Laboratory (ARL; Adelphi, MD) to develop a high-power multimode diode-laser source with an output of 1 kW. Alfalight said the results of this contract are expected to have ‘‘significant’‘ impact on fundamental diode-source brightness and produce new techniques for combining the output of several laser emitters into one compact spot.

This program will provide a new diode-based high-energy laser architecture with important defense and commercial applications,” said Gary Wood, chief of the Electrooptics and Photonics Division at ARL.

Agilent selling Lumileds to Philips

Agilent Technologies (Palo Alto, CA) signed a definitive agreement to sell its 47% stake in Lumileds (San Jose, CA) to Royal Philips Electronics (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) for $950 million-plus repayment of $50 million of debt from Lumileds. The deal gives Philips a controlling stake of 96.5% in Lumileds; Lumileds employees will own the remaining 3.5%.

Founded in 1999 as a joint venture between Agilent and Philips, Lumileds makes LED chips and packaged LEDs, including the high-power Luxeon light sources. Philips is reportedly most interested in the high-power Luxeon product line for lighting applications. Lumileds had sales of $324 million and operating profit of $83 million over the last 12 months.

Fiber lasers meet the shipbuilding industry

IPG Laser (Burbach, Germany) announced that IMG (Rostock, Germany), a developer and manufacturer of shipbuilding production equipment, demonstrated IPG’s 10-kW fiber-laser welding 6- and 12-m-long micro ship panels at IMG’s July 11 open house for the shipbuilding industry.

In a hybrid welding process using standard welding heads, IMG showed that a 10-kW fiber laser can weld shipyard steel at high speeds-6-mm plates at 3.2 m/min and 10-mm plates at 1.5 m/min using 7.8-kW and 10-kW laser power, respectively.Gail Overton

Also in the news . . .

Universal Display(Ewing, NJ) was awarded a nine-month, $98,894 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I contract by the U. S. Department of Energy (Washington, D.C.) to increase the brightness and power efficiency of white OLED lighting. . . . Diomed (Andover, MA) received a Notice of Allowance from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office allowing a patent encompassing a proprietary marked introducer sheath for use with its patented laser treatment for varicose veins. . . . IPG Photonics (Oxford, MA) was awarded a contract by the U.S. Naval Surface Warfare Center (Crane, IN) for its 10-kW continuous-wave ytterbium fiber-laser system. . . . Alfalighthas received an additional $7 million in funding, led by GF Private Equity Group. . . . Princeton Lightwave(Cranbury, NJ) was awarded second-year funding by the U.S. Department of Defense’s High Energy Laser Joint Technology Office to continue development of highly scalable eye-safe solid-state lasers. . . . Milton Chang, managing director of Incubic Venture Capital(Mountain View, CA) was elected to the Board of Trustees of the California Institute of Technology (Pasadena, CA).

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