PROMOTIONAL FEATURE
For the second year in a row, Lightwave Logic has won the Industry Award for Most Innovative Hybrid PIC/Optical Integration Platform from the European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC). The award highlights exceptional achievements in advancing the business of photonic integration circuits and is granted by a technical committee of industry peers and industrial corporations. Beyond just the last two years of earning this award, Lightwave Logic continues to demonstrate leadership in the photonics industry with outstanding 200Gbps per lane performance for our technologies that aligns well with datacenter expectations today. Lightwave Logic 2024 Industry Award for Most Innovative Hybrid PIC/Optical Integration Platform Winner
Located in Engelwood, Colorado, Lightwave Logic is developing a platform that leverages its proprietary engineered electro-optic (EO) polymers to transmit data at higher speeds with less power in a small form factor package. Lightwave Logic has been pursuing this potential of electro-optic polymers to replace existing modulators, using its patented Perkinamine molecular compounds – state-of-the-art organic materials that can be used to create the polymers. The company starts with its proprietary organic chromophores, which are a key ingredient of polymers, and deposits them onto a silicon chip to add an optical modulator function. During fabrication, the polymers are aligned through a brief application of a high voltage, enabling ultra-fast modulation at ultra-low power. The polymer materials are then seamlessly deposited into Photonic Integrated Circuits, PICs. Polymer enabled silicon PICs modulators perform stably and reliably, meaning they are well positioned to displace current semiconductor technologies.
One of the advantages of using polymer modulators can be understood through the analogy of automotive vehicles; using these modulators is akin to upgrading a car simply by replacing its engine with a better one, while keeping the rest of the structure the same. Similarly, polymer modulators can improve fibre optic modules, without requiring wholesale upgrades to existing data center infrastructure including fiber cabling. Thanks to velocity/phase matching properties of electro-optic polymers, polymer-based PICs have inherently high performance, and, crucially, the potential for this to increase even further in later- generation products. Technology with this performance headroom is essential to support the continual upgrading that the Internet and optical networks need. Conversely, competing technologies – both those that are incumbent and those competing for new business – may not work well beyond the maturation of the current generation of technology. One way to visualise this performance potential is to consider the same baseline of 3 dB optical bandwidth
in each modulator. Over the past 10 years, semiconductor modulators have generally been achieving around 20-30 GHz, but recent enhancements to both silicon and indium phosphide designs have raised their performance to 40-50 GHz, occasionally approaching 60 GHz. In general, to achieve 100 Gbps (or 100 Gbaud NRZ) and 200 Gbps (or 100 Gbaud PAM4) encoding, a 70 GHz 3 dB optical bandwidth is required. Today, many data center operators are seeking technologies that can achieve 200 Gbps per lane. Since polymer modulators can reach 70 GHz, and even 150 GHz – about double current lane rates – they could pave the way for 1.6 Tbps with 4 lanes at 400G. Moreover, when enhanced with plasmonic designs, modulator devices using Lightwave Logic’s electro-optic polymer material have exhibited 3 dB bandwidths exceeding 250 GHz. For more information on Lightwave Logic, and it’s EO polymer technology, visit https://www.lightwavelogic.com.
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INDUSTRY FOCUS 2024/2025
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