Englewood, Colorado based, Lightwave Logic  has successfully demonstrated, together with its packaging partner, packaged polymer modulators designed for 50Gbps.  

Packaging is important for any optoelectronic or photonic device, in that it allows the micron-scale electrical contacts on a device to be accessed by the outside world and provides a platform for optical signals to both enter and exit the modulator. Packaging also protects the modulator from the normal environmental hazards with mounting and connecting of devices.

Modulators are critical components of data and telecommunications networks that perform the task of converting digital information into pulses of light for transmission over fiber optic networks.  Polymer modulators have significant cost and performance advantages over current legacy devices which are based on inorganic crystalline materials such as silicon and indium phosphide. {loadmodule mod_ijoomla_adagency_zone,In-article}

Over the past 6 months, the Lightwave Logic technical team worked together with its partner to complete the design with careful attention paid to optical and electrical signaling issues.  These accomplishments not only represent an important technological step for the company but also advances the company’s commercialization effort by enabling the ability to provide polymer modulators for customers to measure, characterize, and evaluate.  Further optimizations will be made between the package and the polymer modulator to fine-tune performance parameters of prototypes before customer evaluations can begin.  

Polymer modulators that operate both at 25Gbps and 50Gbps are expected to be attractive to customers for characterization as the 25Gbps data rate is critical for the 100Gbps data communications and telecommunications market while the 50Gbps data rate allows the ability to address the 400Gbps and 800Gbps systems with a high-performance, cost-effective solution.

The datacom and telecommunications application markets represent a market opportunity for Lightwave Logic PIC-based technologies with fiber-based transceivers that in total is forecasted to grow to over $25B by 2025.

Dr. Lebby, CEO of Lightwave Logic noted, “packaging devices whether they be semiconductor silicon or indium phosphide is always a multi-disciplinary engineering challenge, and similarly for polymer materials. This achievement is consistent with the timeline we indicated at the Annual Shareholders Meeting in May 2017.  Our team has addressed difficult engineering challenges successfully and efficiently, enabling us to produce what we consider to be world-class engineering solutions in the polymer photonics field.”

Dr. Lebby added, “We firmly believe that our new and innovative packaging platform will allow us to scale our polymer-based PIC (P²IC) platform with our Mach-Zehnder ridge waveguide modulator design as well as other photonics devices competitively in the 100Gbps and 400Gbps datacom and telecommunications applications market.”