23 September 2003 Tucson, AZ/Oxford, CA Lightwave--NP Photonics and Chromux Technologies announced a manufacturing and distribution partnership. NP Photonics is a supplier of fiber-based products for sensing, telecommunications, and research applications. Chromux is a micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) based optical components and subsystem supplier serving the defense and telecommunication industries.
According to the agreement, Chromux will become the exclusive manufacturer of NP Photonics' compliant MEMS (CMEMS) products. The CMEMS products include tunable filters, optical spectrum analyzer engines, and optical performance monitoring modules. NP Photonics will retain the rights to these products and continue to sell them under the NP Photonics brand. The company will also continue to manufacture its Scorpion fiber lasers, fiber amplifiers, and ASE sources at its Tucson, AZ facility.
NP Photonics has also named Chromux as one of its Asian distributors. Chromux will market and distribute NP Photonics' CMEMS products in China and South Korea while NP Photonics will maintain its distribution channels in Japan, India, Europe, and the United States.
"We see this as a long-term partnership that will help us improve upon our existing product lines and accelerate our outreach to Asia," said Daryl Eigen, senior vice president of sales and marketing at NP Photonics. "The success of both our micro fiber products and our CMEMs products led us to a point where we needed to outsource the manufacturing of one of these technologies. Since our Tucson facility is geared for manufacturing fiber-based products, outsourcing the CMEMS manufacturing was the natural choice. We feel fortunate to have found a partner such as Chromux that has extensive experience with MEMS technologies and that can handle the volume production we foresee over the next several years."
Chromux will manufacture the CMEMS products at its 60,000-square-foot facility in Oxnard, CA, which includes a 12,000-square-foot Class 100/1000 clean room. In addition to offering a variety of wafer fabrication and OEM manufacturing services, Chromux also manufactures its own line of products for next generation DWDM applications at the facility.
"We are looking forward to working with NP Photonics and are very optimistic that this will turn out to be a long-lasting and mutually rewarding relationship," said John Auyeung, executive vice president of sales and marketing at Chromux. "We have the comprehensive expertise and experience in engineering, fabricating, packaging, and testing of MEMS-based optical products that NP Photonics desired. And their unique technology will help us add more functionality to our existing DWDM products."
Chromux plans to integrate NP Photonics' CMEMS technology into its reconfigurable add/drop multiplexer subsystems, thereby increasing the functionality of its flagship ROADplexer product line. The ROADplexer provides DWDM equipment manufacturers with a single integrated module that incorporates the critical functions of reconfigurable OADMs, including mux/demux, switching, variable optical attenuator, channel power monitoring and equalization, all in the small form factor of a line card.