Telecommunications Applications
Key Benefits
- Rapid prototyping
- Low set-up costs
- Sophisticated Bragg gratings
- Accurate wavelength locking
- Reduced cross talk
- Improved channel isolation
- Integrated wavelength multiplexing
- Integrated dispersion compensation.
Integrated optical circuits are
increasingly used in the
telecoms industry and are often cited as the future for technology
development
in optical communications. Stratophase’s Direct
Writing
technology provides a
highly flexible approach to manufacturing integrated optical circuits
incorporating Bragg Gratings. These circuits are directly written into
standard
telecoms substrate blanks; thus there is no requirement to produce
masks or carry
out photolithography for each different device. The Bragg gratings are
also written
as part of the same process of writing the waveguide, thus simplifying
the
process overall. This dramatically reduces costs and the turnaround
time for
new designs.
The Direct Writing technology
allows a wide variety of
components to be written including Bragg gratings, splitters,
combiners,
filters, crossovers etc. The Bragg gratings can be manufactured with
any centre
wavelength from 1.2µm to 1.7µm on the same chip,
and can be accurately
controlled to give chirp, apodisation and phase shifts.
Some of the possible uses of these circuits include WDM components – eg add-drop multiplexers, filters, dispersion compensators, NxN splitters, wavelength lockers. To illustrate a few examples of what is possible, we have produced some laboratory Bragg grating products. For instance within a telecoms WDM system, locking the transmitting laser to set channel frequencies is important– our Bragg Gratings can be integrated with diode lasers to provide the wavelength locking function.
Please contact us to discuss you needs.