High performance and high production
Our world-leading planar lightwave circuit (PLC) fabrication facility produces wafer-level and chip-level components for the majority of the world’s telecommunications networks. We build these multi-layered photonic devices through a combination of processes – flame hydrolysis deposition and plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition – to achieve both high performance and high production capacity.
To produce our 8-inch silica-on-silicon PLC wafer, we first apply a layer of doped silica glass on top of an 8-inch silicon wafer to form the waveguide ‘core’ layer. This is then photolithographically exposed and etched, using standard semiconductor processing techniques, to leave behind free-standing patterned waveguide structures corresponding to the final device. Finally, a further ‘cladding’ layer is applied, encapsulating the patterned waveguide within glass.
The refractive index contrast between the core and cladding with silica-on-silicon technology is typically only 1-2%, which is far lower than with most other photonic integrated circuit (PIC) fabrication technologies. This has two important advantages:
- The propagation losses within the waveguide are very low at <0.03 dBcm-1.
- The refractive index of the core layer is very close to that of silica optical fiber, which can be easily and effectively butt-coupled with interface losses <0.3dB.
This means silica PLC devices provide the lowest insertion loss of all PIC technologies – a critical parameter in all telecommunications networks. We use 8-inch wafers to maximize the number of devices obtained from each wafer, ensuring the highest capacity at the lowest prices.
Arrayed Waveguide Gratings (AWGs)
Our silica-on-silicon planar lightwave circuit (PLC) fabrication on 8-inch wafers provides the lowest insertion loss of all photonic integrated circuit (PIC) technologies – critical in all telecommunications networks – while ensuring maximum capacity, cost-effectively.
Athermalization
Our athermalization technology enables cost-effective, reliable and truly passive operation of PLC devices in DWDM networks, across a wide temperature range with no power needed.
Mach-Zehnder Interferometer (MZI)
Allowing for less strict tolerances on other components in the network, our patented Mach-Zehnder Interferometer (MZI) technology reduces costs, while providing low insertion loss with high channel uniformity and reliability.
Bidirectional AWG (cyclic)
Our bidirectional cyclic AWGs dramatically reduce the amount of fiber needed to deploy a network and halves the number of AWGs required.
