FREMONT, Calif., March 13 -- Genoa Corp., an optical semiconductor company, announced that it has raised an additional $75 million during its third round of funding. Investors in this funding round included August Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Global Crossing, Investor AB, Levensohn Capital, Meritech Capital Partners, Oak Investment Partners and WorldCom Ventures. This brings total funding for the company to about $95 million.
   This funding round was announced simultaneously with Genoa's launch of the world's first single chip linear optical amplifier (LOA) -- a small semiconductor device capable of amplifying light in the optical communications network. Proceeds will be used to ramp up the company's Indium Phosphide manufacturing facility as well as fund the continued growth in engineering, marketing and sales the company said. The LOA represents the first semiconductor-based photonic amplifier able to simultaneously amplify dozens of different wavelengths of light without distortion, even if those wavelengths are unpredictably switched in and out of the communications path. Customer tests of the new LOA are currently underway and commercial samples will be available later this year.
   "Genoa is a significant company," said Andy Rappaport of August Capital, which led the original investment in Genoa in 1998. "It has invented the first, practical optical equivalent of the transistor. As a result, Genoa can, for the first time, make single-chip optical amplifiers that can work in today's dense, multi-wavelength optical networking applications. In our opinion, Genoa's breakthroughs - -which are covered by numerous filed and issued patents -- will likely lead to a major restructuring of the economics of the optical communications market, following the path electronics took subsequent to the invention of the transistor amplifier."