Optoelectronic component manufacturer II‐VI has announced its intent to acquire CoAdna, a manufacturer of optical components, modules and sub-systems, for approximately $85 million in cash, which itself includes $40 million in cash belonging to CoAdna. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2018 and will enable II-VI to better address the growing demand in reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) line cards driven by the emergence of 5G technologies.
CoAdna specialises in wavelength selective switches (WSS) based on its own LightFlow liquid crystal platform and II-VI’s micro-optics. The WSS modules have a history of being integrated alongside II-VI’s optical amplifiers, optical channel monitors and other components on ROADM line cards.
‘CoAdna and II-VI have been great business partners for many years, leveraging each other’s complementary products and technologies to serve the optical transport market,’ said Sunny Sun, president of II-VI’s photonics segment. ‘We are eager to realise our synergies to grow the WSS business over our strong sales channels and shorten the time to market for our new products.’
The companies’ combined portfolio of products for ROADM line cards will include fixed- and flex-band 1xN WSS, tuneable mux/demux, dual-chip pump lasers, passive components, arrayed-EDFAs, high-resolution optical channel monitors and optical time domain reflectometers. II-VI also designs and manufactures fully-integrated ROADM line cards. CoAdna will contribute to the joint product portfolio of its OvS platform, which features a distributed cross connect architecture for datacentre networking.
‘With our manufacturing scale…vertical integration and broad product portfolio, we are well positioned for the growth in ROADM demand driven by metro network upgrades, new datacentre interconnect architectures and the emerging 5G wireless infrastructure,’ commented Sun.
II-VI recently reported second fiscal quarter revenue of $281.5 million for 2018, up 21.4 per cent over the same period last year. According to the firm, its newer products accounted for more than half of the growth experienced during the quarter.
