Glasgow, UK, February 26, 2004. Optoelectronic chip maker Intense is expanding headcount and facilities at its UK semiconductor fabrication plant, to handle demand from new markets. The initial focus on the telecommunications sector has now broadened, with printing and defense markets now featuring heavily in the order book.
To meet this demand, the company has grown headcount from 50 in late 2003 to 65 today, and expects the trend to continue throughout 2004, with most additions in engineering and production technician roles. It has also added some 500 sq.m of office space with a new mezzanine floor, and extended clean-room facilities for wafer fabrication, test and packaging by around 25%.
"Optical integrated circuits are a platform for progress for many industry sectors, not just telecoms, and our broader focus is opening up significant new markets for our core technology", says Intense CEO David Lockwood. "Intense's unique manufacturing process and our investment in an optical wafer fab makes us one of a tiny handful of companies worldwide that are able to deliver state-of-the-art optoelectronics to early-adopter OEMs."
Intense serves its markets with application-specific variants of its innovative semiconductor laser technology, and through custom device design and processing. Behind the company's commercial success is a unique quantum well intermixing (QWI) process for fabricating optical chips. This proprietary process allows multiple optical functions to be fabricated in a single processing stage, for reliable high-yield production. Intense proved this in its start-up phase with example designs of multi-function laser arrays for telecommunication systems, and this technology has now drawn the attention of OEMs in other areas including remote sensing equipment for defense, and for applications in printing.
"We are already commencing production of laser arrays for printing applications", says Neil Weston, Intense's President of Sales and Marketing. "By switching to semiconductor technology in place of traditional optically-pumped solid-state lasers, we are helping OEMs in this sector to make exceptional gains in terms of size, cost and power consumption. Intense is also working on laser array designs for clients in the defense sector, and we expect to start volume production for at least one of these projects later in 2004."
Telecoms remains a focus for Intense, and the company expects the current upturn in this market sector - and the pronounced interest in tunable optics - to stimulate demand for another of its innovative multi-function optical IC concepts: the broadband electro-absorption modulator (EAM).
EAMs today are typically fixed-wavelength indium phosphide (InP) devices or more versatile but much bulkier devices based on lithium niobate material. Intense's QWI process is able to monolithically integrate multiple InP modulators on a single die, as well as a semiconductor optical amplifier - providing an extremely small device that will operate over the complete C-band with zero insertion loss. The architecture is particularly relevant for the shorter-haul WDM (wavelength division multiplexing) transmission markets, which require a more dynamic approach to service provisioning. Intense's prototype chip design complements emerging tunable laser technologies, allowing OEMs to build an all-solid-state solution that is very compact and suited to volume manufacture.
"We have demonstrated monolithic broadband EAM capability in the lab, and have the development and manufacturing service to bring an application-specific device into commercial production rapidly", adds Weston.
For more information, visit www.intenseco.com/integration .
Laser Focus World