Photonic Integration
CyOptics’ in-house Indium Phosphide (InP) and Silica-on Silicon technology platforms and diverse toolbox of device elements enable the efficient design and the scalable high volume fabrication of a broad variety of optical ASICs.
Traditionally, optical transmission at data rates of 10Gbps and below relied on only one laser and one receiver per optical path. With the ever increasing bandwidth demand and the increase in data rate to 40Gbps and beyond these traditional single lane architectures are no longer adequate to provide economical solutions meeting faceplate density, power consumption and transmission distance in next generation optical equipment. Instead, the signal is broken down into lower data rate signals, which are transmitted using multi-lane architectures.
For optical links in Datacenter or Metro-Core applications either dense wavelength division, coarse wavelength division, or local area network wavelength division multiplexed architectures are used to carry 4, 10 or even more optical lanes per path. For optical links in long-haul networks coherent 40Gbps and 100Gbps bit streams are created by combining multiple symbols per bit through polarization multiplexing and multi-level phase modulation.
Each of these multi-lane transmitters and receivers are comprised of multiple lasers and detectors per package and require very advanced device, integration and packaging platforms to achieve highest levels of integration and to minimize the physical real-estate of the packaged component.
CyOptics achieves these highest levels of integration by either monolithic or hybrid integration, or by a combination of both methods. In monolithic integration all active and passive device functions are integrated in a single Indium Phosphide (InP) chip, while in multi-chip (hybrid) assemblies, the active InP laser and detector devices are integrated with their Passive device counterparts in either Silica on Silicon or Silicon on Insulator.
Monolithic integration is enabled by CyOptics industry leading Indium Phosphide epitaxial growth and regrowth, wafer and chip fabrication platforms. For hybrid integration we use our proprietary TERAPICSTM platform, which leverages our InP active devices, and our in-house Silica-on-Silicon and proprietary, highly automated, sub-micron precision assembly platforms. Our laser and detectors, either discrete devices or in array bars are mounted on or interconnected to our Silica-on Silicon based Planar Lightguide Circuits (PLCs), which encompass passive optical features and functions such as optical multiplexer or de-multiplexer. Our highly automated assembly equipment enables the very precise and accurate sub-micron mechanical alignment of optical waveguides between these active and passive functional elements achieving highest performance, highest yield and lowest cost.
Since we are one of the few companies in our industry with vertically integrated technology and manufacturing platforms and control all aspects of the development and manufacturing process, our optical ASICs leverage the best integration method for any given application.