LONGMONT, CO -- Lightwave Logic, Inc. announces that its Polymer Photonics technology is bringing the Moore's Law concept to the photonics industry. The term Polymer Photonics describes the melding (or integration) of highly miniaturized photonic circuitry on silicon with the power and scalability of organic polymer materials.
With advanced design techniques, this platform can include CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductors) as well as other photonics components (such as waveguides, spot-size converters, filters, etc.). The Company's existing library of Polymer Photonics components along with a new library of silicon photonics components will permit the Polymer Photonics platform to address much higher performance computational applications (such as datacom and telecom), but also with a very low-cost structure.
Because of the open chemical architecture of organic polymers, they can offer endless material variations that can improve performance to solve today's market demand for increased power, smaller footprint, and lower voltage at a decreased cost. But similar to the development of Integrated Circuits, Polymer Photonics can bring this dynamic into the world of big data. The lack of scalability inherent to inorganic-based technologies has hampered the ability of telecommunications and data communications industries to keep up with the ever-increasing demand driven by an explosion of new data-intensive applications.
Lightwave's current library of Polymer Photonic components includes slot waveguide modulators, ridge waveguide modulators, passive waveguides, and waveguide splitters. The component library will be expanded to include multiplexers, demultiplexers, and spot-size converters, necessary in telecom and datacom devices. Combining these advanced polymer components with increasing density of circuits on silicon will create a compelling portfolio of PIC (Photonics Integrated Circuit) products.
Moore's Law focuses on the doubling of integration density of transistors on a silicon integrated platform every 24 months. This constant has held steady for the past 40 years to a point where today, a single IC (Integrated Circuit) contains over 2B or 2 x 109 transistors. Conversely, in the photonics world, the level of maturity is still only in the 100s of photonic devices integrated onto a single chip. Even with hero research experiments demonstrating several thousand circuits, the level of integration is in its infancy and lags far behind the silicon IC world.
The combination of Polymer Photonics with a silicon platform, such as a slot waveguide modulator coated with a thin coat polymer as the active component, will enable photonics to grow in integration density faster than before, and beyond 1000 photonics devices on a single chip. Polymer Photonics components are naturally low cost and high performance and allow for high integration scaling design-rules, especially on silicon. Polymer Photonics can not only address 100 Gbps and beyond computational speeds, but achieve this at low cost, and in a miniaturized format that allows integration levels to start following Moore's Law from a photonics perspective. This allows for scalability to achieve not only 100 devices, or 1000 devices, but over 10,000 and 100,000 devices on a polymer/silicon platform.
For more information, go to http://www.lightwavelogic.com