Queensgate Instruments

Queengate was founded in 1979 by Ken Reay, Jim Ring, Tom Hicks, Paul Atherton and Martyn Wells to make servo stabilised Fabry-Perot Interferometers for use on large telescopes in astronomy.

In 1985 QI launched the first of a range of nanopositioning products, for use in microscopy, and then arrange of miniaturised tunable Fabry Perot Filters with fiber pigtails (the MicroFilter), which evolved into a Network Monitoring product used in high bandwidth optical telecoms. QIs products were used extensively at the world’s largest telescopes, on satellites, on the space station robot arm,For testing disk drive heads, controlling Lithography platforms, and in scanning probe microscopes, all enabled by the ability to move and to measure to sub atomic precision, using capacitance micrometers and piezo electric actuators.

Queensgate was acquired by Spectra Diode Labs (SDL) in March 2001. In July 2001 SDL were acquired by JDS Uniphase.