By Jo McIntyre
Small Times Correspondent
March 4, 2002 — NanoOpto Corp.’s new fab plant in Somerset, N.J., opened for business today, ready to take orders to mass-produce three products.
The company will show prototypes of its subwavelength optical elements (SOEs) at the Optical Fiber Communication trade show and exhibit in Anaheim, Calif., March 19-21.
The first three products in this group manipulate tiny wavelengths of laser light: one polarizes or focuses light waves in one direction, another splits the tiny beams and another puts the beams back together. Preliminary engineering samples have been shared with select customers for the past several months.
The venture-funded NanoOpto has 30 employees and makes the SOEs using a proprietary nanofabrication process. The devices are wafers with nanosize structures imprinted on them. They allow optical signals to be processed on a much smaller scale than possible with competing optical components, the company said.
“I wish I’d had that when I was at Lucent,” said Barry Weinbaum, who left Lucent Technologies to become NanoOpto’s chief executive in August. He said customers will also appreciate the very short turnaround time from order to production.
“We have the ability to get into (sales of) millions of components per year,” Weinbaum said. “We can do thousands of components on a single wafer. It is fairly straightforward to imprint the mold, then separate it.”
With those capabilities, and interest from “dozens” of potential customers, Weinbaum expects NanoOpto to be in the black, or at least show a positive cash flow, “in the back half of 2003.”
The SOEs provide functions that already exist in the market, said Hubert Kostal, vice president of marketing. “We’re providing a replacement for those functionalities. In certain applications, if you use our device you can make the component you are building smaller — and with fewer components. An amplifier or switch, for example.”
A light wave carries information as it moves along fiber optic networks. It has a tendency to drop off, or weaken, as a function of the distance it has traveled. Amplifiers strengthen signals from laser light as it moves along the networks, while switches act as traffic signals, moving information to specific locations. Amplifiers and switches are used in equipment like cell phones, where size matters. The smaller the subcomponent, the happier the cell phone maker is.
Kostal said that with $2.5 billion being spent in equipment by the industry, fiber optics continues to be big business even during the economic slowdown. The network “is still being built and deployed, although much more slowly,” Kostal said. “It’s not as if it had gone dry. Network service providers continue to look for ways to reduce costs. We are looking for places where we have a distinct advantage over existing components.”
NanoOpto could have an advantage in its market because the company’s materials can fit right into existing processes, said Karen Liu, an optical components analyst for RHK Inc., a telecom industry analysis firm based in San Francisco.
“What they have in their favor is that they could be a drop-in replacement, so they don’t have to create a whole, new market,” Liu said. “This has an easier route into a buyer, because it is simpler and fits right in.”
In December, NanoOpto received $16 million from Bessemer Venture Partners, Morgenthaler Ventures, New Enterprise Associates and U.S. Trust. Rob Soni and Glenn Falcao from Bessemer joined the board along with two Morgenthaler Ventures general partners, Greg Blonder and Gary Shaffer.
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