Firm has a vision for new jobs

Bookham Technology, which made £200 million earlier this year when it floated on the stockmarket, currently employs 200 people at Faraday Park and a further 850 in Abingdon.

Now it wants to open a new manufacturing, research, development and office base in St Andrew's Ridge in Abbey Meads and that could lead to the creation of even more jobs.

Rachel Woodford, Bookham corporate communications manager, said: "We are growing at a phenomenal rate and our intention is to put in place a plan that will allow this expansion to continue long-term.

"We will continue to operate from Milton Park in Oxfordshire, where we have just completed a major expansion of our fabrication facility.

"We will also operate from our recently-opened assembly and testing facility at Dorcan in Swindon, for the foreseeable future.

"Our over-riding goal is to ensure that our company has a coherent expansion plan, and that our staff have the working environment one would expect of a substantial multi-national company.

"We are still very early in the planning stages of this project at the moment."

The company was last year awarded Millennium Product Status from the Design Council for its optic chip and its founder Dr Andrew Rickman was awarded an OBE.

Jack Kilby, the man who invented the silicon chip and is a non-executive director of the company, was recently awarded a Nobel Prize for physics.

Dr Rickman has a vision that Swindon's Northern Development Area, where the new site would be located, will become the British equivalent of California's Silicon Valley.

The 39-year-old launched Bookham Technology from a room above his garage at Savernake Forest in Marlborough in 1989. He revolutionised the computer industry by speeding up Internet access for homes and businesses, using circuits based on light and optics rather than electronics.

Since then its staff members have soared to more than 1,000 throughout the UK and is already outgrowing its Dorcan base.

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