OCP to ditch 1300 nm VCSEL business
The long-wavelength VCSEL unit belonging to Optical Communication Products (OCP) is to shut down at the end of this month.
"We expect to cease operation of our Colorado facility as of January 31, 2006," said OCP in a December filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission, claiming that the declining cost of Fabry-Pérot edge-emitting lasers has made 1300 nm VCSELs an unattractive proposition for their replacement in future modules.
As recently as last July, OCP's director of VCSEL technology Dave Kisker told Compound Semiconductor magazine that the InGaAsN devices were alive and well in two of OCP's transceiver products, with more applications in the pipeline.
Because they were based on a dilute-nitride structure, the long-wavelength VCSELs could be fabricated on much cheaper GaAs substrates rather than on InP. However, it appears that OCP does not regard that cost advantage as sufficient to displace the edge-emitters.
"We expect to cease the immediate development of products based on 1300nm VCSEL technology, although we will retain the intellectual property for future development," added OCP, which is headquartered in Woodland Hills, CA.
OCP acquired the Broomfield, CO, facility from Cielo Communications back in October 2002 after the optical telecom bubble had burst, paying $5 million (see related story).
Included in that sale was capital equipment, inventory and intellectual property.
Other companies still targeting the market for fiber-optic components with dilute-nitride lasers include the US company Picolight and the Danish firm Alight Technologies.
Alight acquired dilute-nitride know-how in its buy-out of one of the last remaining parts of Infineon Technologies' fiber-optic business last year, and is in the process of marrying this technology with its existing photonic bandgap structures to increase the output power of the devices.
