Red Herring Venture Market Europe 12-13 June 2001

    LONDON, June 11 /PRNewswire/ -- Kamelian, the UK based start-up
manufacturing optical chips for use in long haul and metropolitan optical
networks, today revealed the roadmap for its semiconductor optical amplifier
products.
    Paul May, Kamelian's CEO, announced at Red Herring's prestigious Venture
Market Europe conference in London a range of products that will be shortly
sampled to several customers.
    These products include application-specific semiconductor optical
amplifier (SOA) devices such as optical pre-amplifiers that provide compact
low cost gain throughout the optical network.
    Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexers (ROADMs) which allow optical
signals to be dropped or added at key points in the optical network will also
be available for sampling in Q3 of this year.  The ROADM was recently
demonstrated live at the leading annual optical component trade conference
(OFC) in the US where it was voted one of the show's hot products.
    Future SOA products using the company's proprietary hybrid integration
technology include wavelength converters and optical regenerators -- these
will finally enable true all-optical networks.
    Commenting on these developments Paul May, Kamelian's CEO said, "SOAs are
key components for the optical infrastructure as there is an increasing
requirement for low cost, compact gain elements all over the network.  We are
developing chip and packaging technologies that allows SOAs to be integrated
with other optical components to produce the price and performance
improvements demanded by our customers."

    Background on Kamelian
    Since its founding in July 2000, Kamelian has raised over $27M from 3i in
Europe, Lightspeed Venture Partners -- a leading Silicon Valley based VC --
and from Goldman Sachs the global investment bank.
    The company has a development facility in Glasgow and a manufacturing
facility in Oxford and has 35 staff expected to grow to 100 by year-end.
    The market in which Kamelian is operating is expected to be worth at least
$10bn by 2003.  Kamelian's first products will be released before the year
end.
    The company is headed up by Chief Executive Officer Paul May, a founder
and Technical Director of Cambridge Display Technology.  Tim Bestwick, a
former Director of Technology Strategy with Bookham, is Chief Operating
Officer.  Ivan Andonovic, Professor of Broadband Optical Networks at
Strathclyde University, is Chief Technical Officer.

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