About |
Since 1999 the company has been working very far back in Research and Development in anticipation of the advancing spatial density issues being faced today by data centers worldwide and photonic supercomputer architects.
Unlike metal conductive wires getting electrons in and out of semiconductors, moving tiny photons in and out of Photonic ICs is very challenging. As optical properties change direction, make turns and bend around tiny photonic ICs in 1 micron guides, this light is impacted in similar manner as your vision is impacted if you put on another person’s eyeglasses with a different prescription. Over time, your performance likely would be impacted negatively.
Chiral Photonics innovations and contributions to this strategic and important movement in technology to photonics is this NEW PROFA product line, an evolution of Chiral Photonics’ successful Spot Size Converting Interconnects (SSCIs) that interface standard optical fibers with photonic integrated circuits (PICs). PROFA is a multichannel, two-dimensional dense fiber array best suited for vertical interfacing to, for example, VCSELs, receivers or vertically coupled gratings. A monolithic glass structure incorporating an adiabatic taper and integrated pigtails brings multiple optical channels close together for efficient, space-saving coupling. The technology reduces channel pitch while tailoring numerical aperture (NA) of individual channels to meet customers’ needs.
Chiral Photonics developed and has recently displayed in Q1 2012 a 60+ channel device with singlemode waveguides in the visible spectral range with channel-spacing of app 5 um.
Traditional solutions for coupling photonic ICs utilize GRIN lens technology, lensed fibers with V-grooves or other solutions which rely on air gaps and more complex production alignment techniques. These techniques are suitable for moderate channel densities but pose substantial thermal expansion/excursion and related reliability challenges. An additional limitation of a conventional, lens-based coupling technique is its inability to control channel spacing and NA independently.
Based on our recent work developing our PROFA product , we learned from our customers that we may also have an opportunity to introduce a closely related (N+1) x 1 optical combiner. We believe that the chief advantages which our design could provide are:
• Improved insertion loss on the signal channel: ≤ 0.3 dB
• Increased number of combined fibers: 37 in the near term (able to be increased soon thereafter)
• Configurable pump geometry to maximize pump conversion efficiency
The PROFA, used to independently change the spatial density of discrete channels, is bidirectional and can be used to split but is also used as a high density coupler for fiber-to-the-chip applications. This enables this device for combining and we have measured low loss (<0.2 dB) on the central channel which would be envisioned to be the signal channel. Similarly, all of the channels could be designed to utilize this low loss technology and we are working with customers now to understand various fiber choices for optimization.
This is an all glass device and the power handling is similar to whatever fiber is being coupled to but with lower loss and higher efficiency than typical combiners in density, environmental stability, coupling and manufacturing efficiencies.
About Chiral Photonics, Inc.
The company has won numerous grants including awards from the National Science Foundation which commended Chiral technology as possibly, “one of the most significant recent advances in the field of polarization and wavelength control” and has more than 30 patents issued and pending.
Chiral Photonics is headquartered in Pine Brook, NJ, USA.