Daily News Briefs

BOC Edwards, a supplier of integrated solutions for the manufacture of microelectronics devices, including semiconductors and flat panel displays, has received $5 million in equipment orders from Powerchip Semiconductor Corp. (PSC), of Taiwan. It will supply iH Series dry vacuum pumps and abatement devices for Powerchip's 300-mm DRAM Fab12B. Shipments and installation will take place in the second and third quarters of 2005. BOC Edwards, part of The BOC Group plc, is based in West Sussex, England. . . . nLight, a Vancouver, Wash., manufacturer of high-power semiconductor lasers, said it has achieved a record for output power from a single 1-cm InP diode laser bar. The 50 percent fill-factor bar, mounted on the company's Cascades microchannel water-cooled package, produced 88 W of continuous-wave (CW) power at 1470 nm. When used as a pump source, the diode laser bar could enable more compact, efficient and less expensive eyesafe diode-pumped solid-state lasers, the company said. High-pulse-energy, solid-state laser systems operating in the eyesafe wavelength range of 1400 to 1600 nm are used in defense and commercial eyesafe laser applications.