Mar 17 2010
Capella Intelligent Subsystems, Inc. and Innovative Micro Technology, Inc. announced today the formation of a strategic foundry relationship.
The collaboration combines Capella’s vision and expertise in next-generation high performance Wavelength Selective Switches (WSS) with IMT’s ability to develop and manufacture sophisticated optical micro-electrical mechanical systems (MEMS) devices to enable the products.
“Capella is setting the standard in size, power consumption, and switching speed for the most advanced WSS technology used in Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexers (ROADM) and Optical Cross Connect (OXC) applications, and IMT’s superior technology enables this,” said Larry Schwerin, CEO of Capella. We needed a world class technology and foundry partner who had proven before that it could tackle hard problems and bring highly complex MEMS devices into production. We evaluated foundries around the world and chose IMT.”
IMT has established in-house expertise in testing products at the wafer and die level and performs functionality and reliability tests on nearly all products it manufactures. This eases the burden on supply chain managers typically eliminating a logistic step in their back-end flow of the product.
“Over the last year, IMT has rapidly ramped up our MEMS devices and now provides a consistent flow of fully tested 96, 48, and 12 channel products,” said Joe Dillon, VP, Operations and Supply Chain of Capella. “The predictable supply and quality of products gives us great confidence that they can easily and cost effectively scale to the ever increasing demands that we see in the market.”
“We’re delighted to be aligned with a visionary in the optical communication market like Capella,” stated John Foster, CEO of IMT. “As complex as these products are, IMT has been able to leverage existing process modules and know-how from all corners of the company, including the use of our proprietary low-temperature alloy bond, high precision photolithography, as well as our ultra smooth mirror deposition process. We look forward to a long relationship with Capella, including these and future generations of WSS products.”