7 May 1998: LightPath Technologies Inc. of the US, which makes and markets Gradium glass products, said it named Donald Lawson chief executive officer to replace Leslie Danziger, who will remain chair…
7 May 1998: LightPath Technologies Inc. of the US, which makes and markets Gradium glass products, said it named Donald Lawson chief executive officer to replace Leslie Danziger, who will remain chairwoman. Lawson will remain president and give up his duties as chief operating office, the company said in a statement. Danziger invented LightPath“s Gradium glass used in telecommunications and founded the company, the statement said. As full-time chairwoman, Danziger will focus on the expansion of Gradium technology into high-growth and high-margin applications, the statement said. Meanwhile, LightPath Technologies Inc. and Invention Machine Corp., a network-design and software-engineering concern, have teamed up to form LightChip Inc. The intent is to deliver devices mapped to a universal design that can be customized to support a variety of dense-wave-division multiplexing applications, including cable TV, fibre-to-the-home and all-fibre local-area networks. “Our first units, which will be for a LAN-type application, will be available for beta trial sometime in the first quarter,” said Paul Dempenwolf, director of optoelectronics-product development at LightPath. Dempenwolf said the new integrated components would allow LANs to feed dedicated wavelengths to different categories of end-users, and to convert those wavelengths to electronic signals, at a cost of about US$ 200 per connection. “We intend to deliver products for cable and telephone-loop applications with the same costs per (wavelength) switch port,” Dempenwolf said. The creation of LightChip follows by a few weeks an agreement between LightPath and Eagle Optoelectronics Inc. of Boulder, Colorado. The deal called for the development of low-cost, high-performance transmitter/receivers. These would be integrated with the wavelength multiplexer/demultiplexers developed by LightChip to support the optical-to-end-user wavelength selection and conversion within a single component. The move by LightPath and Invention Machines reflects growing demand in short-haul telecommunications markets for DWDM solutions that avoid the high costs of long-haul applications while achieving the same types of gains in capacity and all-optical functionality, according to recent reports.