GigOptix makes first sales of polymer based optical modulators

PALO ALTO, USA: GigOptix Inc. has made the first sales of its ground-breaking Electro-Optic (EO) polymer based Mach-Zehnder Modulators (MZM).

The company has delivered the world’s first engineering prototypes of 20G, 40G and 100G polymer MZMs to customers working in the fields of communications, defense and high speed RF.

"We are delighted to see our fundamental materials research turning into real products with this release of our electro-optic polymer modulators to customers," said Dr. Raluca Dinu, Vice President and General Manager of GigOptix-Bothell business unit.

“Since merging with GigOptix, the team is more market focused and we have been able to accelerate our LX EO polymer MZM product development by tapping in to the extensive commercial experience of the of GigOptix team. Our technology is no longer in the experimental phase; now we are focusing on optimizing the manufacturing process for volume production and working with customers to generate differentiated new products for a broad range of market applications.”

Prof. Alan Willner, Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California is among the first customers to receive the 100Gb/s MZM, LX8900.

"GigOptix appears to have made significant advances in the field of ultrahigh bandwidth optical devices which are not possible with other current technologies. My team and I are very excited to receive one of the first 100Gb/s EO polymer modulators from GigOptix,” said Prof. Willner.

“The huge bandwidth of these devices has the potential to enable next generation terabit communication systems and ultrahigh frequency RF communication systems. We are looking forward to investigating the operation of this technology and cooperating with GigOptix to map out its performance over the coming months.”

GigOptix’s electro-optic polymer technology offers significant advantages over the existing crystalline semiconductor technologies used today. These include: simpler manufacturing, larger bandwidth, smaller form factor, lower weight, lower drive voltages and immunity to radiation particularly important for defense and aerospace markets.

Moreover, EO polymer is a thin film spin-on technology whose manufacture is similar to semiconductor processing such as CMOS. This similarity not only opens the door to higher levels of integration that can enable photonic integrated devices for telecom applications but may also hold the potential to tackle the intra-chip communication bottleneck now being seen as the next challenge in the next generation many-core microprocessors.

On-chip optical interconnects are seen by many in industry as the only means of routing signals across next generation CMOS devices.

GigOptix expects its first volume product to be a 40G modulator for the telecom market. Ovum most recent Optical Component Forecast (Inniss and Redpath. “Biannual forecast for optical components vendors: revenues, unit volumes & ASPs.” April 24, 2009) reports that 40G modulators will be the fastest growing segment of the telecom modulator market, growing at a 42 percent CAGR from $13 million in 2009 to $105 million in 2014.