Finisar Corp. (Nasdaq: FNSR) plans to acquire the rest of optical components vendor Ignis ASA in a deal worth NOK425 million (US$76 million), the companies announced Tuesday.

Finisar took an 11 percent stake in Ignis last year, and during the past two days it's upped that stake to 32.6 percent. Finisar is now bidding to own the rest. The $76 million price tag would imply a worth of about $113 million for all of Ignis.

The key piece Finisar is acquiring is a tunable laser designed by Syntune, which Ignis acquired in 2009. Ignis also offers splitters -- a useful piece of passive optical networks (PONs) -- and arrayed waveguides. Finally, Ignis sells transceiver modules, giving it some overlap with Finisar's main product lines.

Why this matters
Finisar is essentially bringing its tunable XFP components in-house, as its biggest rivals have done. JDSU (Nasdaq: JDSU; Toronto: JDU) and Oclaro Inc. (Nasdaq: OCLR) make their own tunable lasers and modulators, for example -- as does Opnext Inc. (Nasdaq: OPXT), which designed its tunable laser specifically for the tunable XFP module. It's been assumed that Finisar's module uses Ignis's tunable laser, garnered through the 2009 acquisition of Syntune.

Ignis's tunable lasers would also go into Finisar's 300-pin transceivers, and other parts would be used to create new 40Gbit/s and 100Gbit/s products, according to Finisar's press release.

For more
See below for the latest on tunable XFPs, including our recent report, and a bit of recent Finisar history.

— Craig Matsumoto, West Coast Editor, Light Reading