SOUTHAMPTON, England, Feb. 12 -- Mesophotonics Ltd., a UK developer of photonic crystal technology, has announced the closing of a $10 million second-round fund raising. UK venture company Quester led the round, with participating investors Auriga Partners, NIF Ventures Co. Ltd. (Tokyo) and London-based BTG plc. Jamie Brooke of Quester and Francois Lainee of Auriga Partners will join Mesophotonics' board of directors. Mesophotonics, a spin-off of the Optoelectronics Research Centre at the University of Southampton, was founded in 2001 in partnership with BTG. It said the new financing is a significant milestone and comes at an important juncture as it moves from prototyping to a product development phase aimed at bringing a new class of photonic crystal optical devices to the market within two years. The company said it has already received its first purchase orders and is in discussions with a number of potential partners. Mesophotonics recently announced it has demonstrated a new method of generating a white-light continuum with over 600 nm of bandwidth produced from low-power femtosecond ultrafast pulses, using a 10-mm-long waveguide grown on a standard silicon wafer. The company said the continuum output "shows an exceptional smooth output spectrum with no visible spectral noise. The lack of noise is a result of designing the waveguides to operate far from the zero of group velocity dispersion, thus avoiding the competing nonlinear processes that are present in the high-noise continuum generated in optical fibers." The continuum-generating chips are expected to have a direct impact on applications in frequency metrology, optical coherence tomography and spectroscopy, which require the high bandwidth but have been hampered by the lack of stability in previous continuum-generation methods, Mesophotonics said. For more information, visit: www.mesophotonics.com