March 20, 2009--Thorlabs (Newton, NJ) acquired Covega (Jessup, MD), a developer of indium phosphide (InP) and lithium niobate (LiNbO3) proprietary technologies. With early focus on the telecom, datacom, and cable TV industries, Covega now generates over one-third of its revenue from serving the defense, medical, industrial, sensing, test & measurement, and instrumentation industries.
Covega specializes in manufacturing gain chips, semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs), and InP products. Its Single Angle Facet (SAF) gain chip solution is a high-power InP active waveguide gain element for external cavity, tunable lasers that provides broad bandwidth, high power, and stable operation. Covega's line of SOA products offer high-saturation power, large gain, and low noise, ideally suited for communication systems, instrumentation, photonics sensors, scientific applications, and fiber-optic gyros. Its InP products are designed for use in the 1050-1850 nm spectral range for telecommunication, medical instrumentation, and sensor applications. And finally, Covega's LiNbO3 technology is Telcordia-compliant with industry-leading long-term reliability.
The Covega team's vast knowledge includes materials, device design, wafer growth and fabrication, processing, advanced E/O device packaging, manufacturing, and system engineering. Members of the management team are industrial veterans with prior experience from Lucent Technologies, Nortel Networks, Newport Corporation, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Motorola, Honeywell, Bosch Telecom, and Optelecom. Covega has a 40,000 square foot facility in central Maryland, which includes 18,000 square feet of class 100 and 10,000 cleanroom facilities.
For more information, go to www.thorlabs.com or www.covega.com.
--Posted by Gail Overton, [email protected]; www.laserfocusworld.com.