Osram exits OLED display business
Organic-light-emitting-diode (OLED) makerOsram Opto Semiconductors (Munich, Germany) will cease production of passive-matrix displays based on OLEDs by the end of the year to concentrate its activities on developing market-ready OLED lighting products. As a result, the OLED-display manufacturing line in Penang, Malaysia, will cease production at the end of the year. The 270 employees there will be transferred to other activities within the company, including a new LED chip-production facility in Penang.
Passive-matrix displays based on OLEDs were marketed under the brand name of Pictiva. Demand for the displays, which are used predominantly in communication systems, industrial applications, and mobile consumer electronics, has lagged far behind the company’s expectations.
Intense gets ESA contract for laser-diode arrays
Semiconductor laser manufacturer Intense (Glasgow, Scotland) announced an R&D contract with the European Space Agency (Noordwijk, Netherlands) called PULSAR (Pump Laser Stacks with Aerospace Reliability) for the development of reliable, high-power, high-efficiency laser-diode arrays for solid-state laser-pumping applications in space.
The increased efficiency of the new arrays will enable considerable power savings aboard space vehicles and reduce heat-removal requirements because a smaller fraction of the input energy will be converted into heat. The high-efficiency laser arrays will be manufactured to a demanding lifetime specification of 12 billion shots in a space environment using Intense’s patented quantum-well intermixing technology.
Philips Lumileds delivers 100 million LEDs
LED manufacturer Philips Lumileds (San Jose, CA) has delivered more than 100 million units of LUXEON Flash power LEDs to camera-phone manufacturers and enabled an entirely new market segment. “Prior to the introduction of LUXEON Flash, there were no solutions available that provided the illumination necessary to produce quality images in low-light environments and users were limited to taking daytime pictures,” said Richard Weiss, vice president, Digital Imaging Business. “Only LUXEON Flash power LEDs provide the light output for video and still imaging without sacrificing battery life.”
Tunable-laser maker gets funding
Syntune (Kista, Sweden), developer of single-chip widely tunable lasers, closed a second round of financing of $7.1 million. “This round of investment enables us to ramp production more quickly, as well as grow our customer base for our first generation of tunable products, as well as our second-generation 10 Gbit/s tunable transmitter product,” said Patrik Evaldsson, CEO.
Syntune has chosen manufacturing partners, such as CyOptics (Breinigsville, PA), to ensure a consistently reliable product. Communications Industry Researcher (Glen Allen, VA) estimates, tunable lasers will be the fastest growing major segment of the components market, reaching almost $1 billion by 2012.
GKS opens laser- scanning facilities
GKS Inspection Services (Plymouth, MI), a provider of three-dimensional laser and terrestrial scanning services since 1981, opened a laser-scanning and inspection service bureau in the Netherlands, GKS Inspection Services Netherlands. The Netherlands team consists of more than 30 experienced engineers based in Ede providing reverse engineering and inspection services and is positioned to serve customers all through the European Union. The company also opened an office in Taiwan, GKS Inspection Services Taiwan.
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Also in the news . . .
The U.S. Air Force has expressed interest in re-establishing production of Raytheon Company’s laser-guided Maverick missile, an air-to-ground weapon that can meet the service’s needs in the near term. . . . IPG Photonics (Oxford, MA) was awarded a $3.8 million contract from the U.S. Navy to supply the Naval Surface Warfare Center with a 44 kW fiber-laser system. . . . Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin announced that the Airborne Laser (see www.laserfocusworld.com/articles/197519) successfully demonstrated in flight that its battle-management and beam-control/fire-control systems can complete the full series of steps required to detect, engage, and destroy a ballistic missile in the boost phase; a shootdown lethal demonstration is still on track for August 2009. . . . Carbon dioxide laser manufacturer Synrad (Mukilteo, WA) shipped its 100,000th laser. . . . Bookham (San Jose, CA) shipped its 100,000th indium phosphide Mach-Zehnder modulator, which has been in production and copackaged with lasers for more than 10 years. . . . Showa Denko (Tokyo, Japan) has decided to expand its production capacity of gallium-nitride-based blue LED chips at its Chiba site to 200 million units a month by June 2008.