The Danish company which last week acquired Bath-based photonic crystal fibre developer BlazePhotonics for $3.3m has said it now has the world’s strongest collection of IP covering the technology.

“The deal is that they had a very good patent portfolio, they and we had the two strongest in the world,” explained Rene Kristiansen, sales manager at Crystal Fibre. “And by acquiring that portfolio we have what is now clearly the best patent position in the world on photonic crystal fibres.”

Photonic crystal fibre, or PCF, guides light using holes of different diameters running along the fibre’s length. By varying the size and location of the holes the fibre’s mode shape, nonlinearity, dispersion and birefringence can be modified over a wide range. This is not possible with conventional fibres.

This year Blaze introduced a new PCF for converting the output of Nd3+ microchip lasers into an optical supercontinuum (an alternative to ASE and SLED sources), and a range of high numerical aperture multimode PCFs in various core sizes.

However, it appears to have suffered from a lack of revenue.

“They were not selling a lot and we were selling a lot more. They started the sale of their products a lot later than we did, but they were certainly a competitor,” continued Kristiansen.

Blaze was spun out of the University of Bath in 2001 to exploit research by Professor Philip Russell and colleagues. It achieved a series of impressive results, including record loss-low figures, and received $9m of venture capital backing.

Kristiansen said the hollow core technology developed by Blaze would be exploited by Crystal Fibre.

“We should be able to make fibres for higher peak power post-transmission, for extreme dispersion compensation post-compression,” he said.

A number of BlazePhotoincs staff will be trasferred to Denmark as part of the deal. No-one at the company was available for comment.

www.crystal-fibre.com