SANTA ROSA, Calif. -- Four design engineers with long experience in the telecommunications industry, today announced the launch of Centellax, Inc., a new company that designs and develops high-speed physical-layer components for the optical communications industry. Incorporated last April, Centellax is already offering its first product, a broadband amplifier for 40 gigabits-per-second (Gb/s) systems. Julio Perdomo, Ph.D., co-founder and president, and two of his fellow co-founders -- Jerry Orr, chief technology officer, and Christian Bourde, product engineering manager -- all came from Agilent Technologies, where, collectively, they amassed more than 40 years of experience in high-speed integrated circuit design. The fourth co-founder, German Gutierrez, manager of mixed signal products, is an 18-year veteran of circuit design at companies that include Broadcom (Newport Communications), AMCC, Brooktree, and Silicon Wave. Centellax will concentrate on product design, testing and quality assurance, outsourcing actual fabrication to a number of foundries. The first product, the Model DA1A broadband amplifier, combines proven technology and an innovative design approach to achieve the performance required by high data-rate optical communication systems. According to Dr. Perdomo, Centellax is developing a family of drivers and mixed signal products -- a full chip set that includes a MUX with a clock multiplying unit, a DEMUX with clock data recovery, a trans-impedance amplifier (TIA), a limit amplifier, and drivers for electro-absorption modulators (EAMs) and both polymer and lithium niobate Mach-Zehnder modulators. "Our products embody the design philosophy of our company -- high-performance, ease of use, reliability, and competitive price," said Dr. Perdomo. "My partners and I at Centellax are all design engineers ourselves, and we know the difficulties first hand that a customer faces when using integrated circuits operating at high frequencies. That's why we're determined that the chip sets we provide will be much easier for our customers to integrate into their designs, helping them bring their own products to market faster. We can do this because we use established, proven technologies, and patent-pending design approaches. As a result, our products will not only be more reliable, but also available in production quantities for integration into our customers' systems."Centellax Inc.