MassHighTech August 11, 2003

 

Aegis Semiconductor jumps confidently into optical telecommunications
By Jeff Miller

Some might call Matthias Wagner brave. Aegis Semiconductor, the Woburn optical components company that he helped found and now leads as chief executive officer, released its first product for commercial availability late last month.

The target market? Makers of optical telecommunications gear, a segment of the telecom industry that’s still reeling from the worst downturn in memory.

Nevertheless, Wagner said gear makers have shown a strong interest in Aegis’ products. The company has shipped components to “about a dozen” companies, most of whom intend to put them in prototype machines.

Aegis has developed a technology platform based on active thin films, which are coatings that can be dynamically tuned to different wavelengths of light. Its first product is an optical channel monitor that rapidly scans multiple optical channels and collects information on the strength of each channel.

Over the past decade, optical engineers have increased the carrying capacity of optical fiber by allowing carriers to send different data streams across different wavelengths all over the same pipe.

“It’s as if you dialed through the FM dial and looked at the signal quality of each of the stations,” Wagner said. “We provide the ability to dial. Without a tunable device like ours, you’d be stuck with one station, or you’d need a different radio for every station.”

The ability to tune the component remotely and automatically means that carriers wouldn’t need to send someone to tune the devices manually, resulting in lower maintenance costs.

More important, however, Aegis claims to be able to provide significantly smaller tunable optical components at half the cost of current active products and roughly the same price as passive components.

“If you can provide very low-cost tunable components, it can be built into many more spots in the network and provide intelligence in more equipment,” Wagner said. “More intelligent equipment translates into less maintenance costs.”

After earning his MBA at the MIT Sloan School of Business, Wagner formed Aegis in early 2000 with a small group of engineers based at Princeton University. His father is a professor there, so Wagner knew the engineering community well.

But though he founded Aegis in New Jersey, he eventually moved it to New England.

“The Massachusetts area is better for a startup,” Wagner said. “Obviously the venture capital community is strong, and Boston is much more diverse in the pool of people available. We were looking for a mix of skills.”

The company has raised about $17 million in VC financing from Stata Ventures, YankeeTek Ventures, St. Paul Venture Capital and Alta Partners.

Wagner said he has considered other markets than telecom for his company’s products and, in fact, has had non-telecom customers inquire about its components. But for now, Aegis is targeting telecom.

“I think it’s important to keep focused on developing a good product,” Wagner said. “We believe that if we develop the right low-cost platform, it can be leveraged in other areas.”