The broader impacts/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project lies in the fact that our lifestyle data-demand is deluging telecom networks. Yet, carriers who could use optical components to service this traffic are extremely cost sensitive. This problem can be solved with simplification of the technologies that are already being used. For example, optical-interconnects is projected to be a $3.5 billion market by 2015 and is a ripe market for such advancement. This project applies the quickness of making polymer waveguides to connecting optical devices in a novel direct-write method. Eliminating technical complexity or removing laborious alignment will potentially dramatically lower manufacturing costs and accelerate optical component adoption by carriers. This market alone has been evaluated to represent about $500M in cost savings. In so doing, the project will also further our understanding of the polymer sciences as it relates to the written waveguide and its effects on the optical path. While cost improvements are first expected in optical-interconnects, this work is likely to later also affect high-speed optical 3D-manufacturing, system-on-a-chip, and Programmable-Optical-Device capabilities.
This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes a method to quickly and reliably makes low-loss connections from a small core-diameter fiber optic cable to an even smaller optical device. Techniques today all require near-perfect alignment of the two and are laborious or require complex technologies. This complexity keeps optical packaging expensive and time consuming. On the other hand, polymers have been widely used to make optical devices using a mask and flood exposure, resulting in devices with identical cross-sectional shape and that lie in one plane. Advanced optical packaging requires non-planar structures with different cross sections at each termination. This project will direct-write polymer waveguides of arbitrary shape and position, in a matter of seconds between optical functional-blocks allowing low loss connections. In addition to connecting fiber optic cable to optical device, this method is an enabler for optical-system-on-a-chip. Other 3D-rapid-prototyping techniques, such as 2 photon lithography, have been attempted but their slowness and rough sidewalls make for commercially unacceptable high loss connections. This project will provide dynamic-tailoring of the cross-sectional shape being written, arbitrary starting and ending points in space, low loss connections, smooth optical path, mode-changing capabilities and high throughput.
Our modern life-style is deluging the telecommunications network with ever more data. With our computers, mobile phones and other connected devices, we consume significantly more data with video and other high band-width applications. Yet, we demand not having to pay equivalently more for these expanded services. Consequently, service-providers have to aggressively cut costs while at the same time expand their network’s capabilities. As a result, the equipment vendors who supply network infrastructure are under significant competitive pressure. And further trickling down the food-chain, the device manufacturers who supply components to those vendors are experiencing increased competition from emerging global low-cost producers. Addressing only the subset of optical-devices that form the backbone of the telecommunications network, this Phase I project, "Optical Wirebonding", introduces a novel packaging method that could dramatically improve the cost and yield of manufacturing such devices. We estimate that if successful this technique could reduce the cost of packaging optical-devices by about a third, and industry analysts have gauged this to be worth up to ~$500M in cost savings. In this manner, this new packaging method could contribute significantly to the further successful growth of the telecommunications network. Several products resulted from this project. Firstly, we successfully engaged the device-manufacturers and successfully packaged one of their commercially available laser-transceivers to a reasonable degree. In so doing, we demonstrated that optical-wirebonding is indeed a viable packaging technique. We further discovered more development and improvements wre needed. Secondly, we successfully filed three patents in the US that encompass the critical parts to the optical-wirebonding technique. All three are pending with the USPTO.
