GigOptix’s 40G polymer modulator in pre-production

BOTHELL, USA: GigOptix Inc. announced that its LX8400, a GPPO connectorized 40G EO polymer Mach-Zehnder Modulator (MZM), has been shipped in pre-production quantities to a number of defense, research and academic customers.

GigOptix is following an outsourced manufacturing model, and has developed the EO polymer modulator for production in cooperation with a volume contract manufacturing partner. GigOptix manufactures the MZM die in its fab in Washington and the CM assembles and packages them at its facility.

In September, GigOptix shipped product from its contract manufacturer’s location to customers signaling an important achievement towards the mass commercialization of EO polymer modulators.

“We have made a lot of progress in the past year. We have brought EO polymer modulators from an internally built research and development stage to a pre-production stage at a contract manufacturer with pre-production units being shipped to select customers,” said Dr. Raluca Dinu, Vice President and General Manager of GigOptix-Bothell business unit. “We are now resolving the final steps that will enable us to go to full volume production release.”

Dr. Dinu added that GigOptix has carried out extensive reliability analysis and testing of its EO Polymer material. "This is a disruptive technology and customers need to know that it can reliably operate for the long term. Prior to the pre-production release our analysis confirmed that this current generation of material is stable and operates well at 85C making it suitable for a number of our customers’ applications."

However, for telecom applications that require a 25-year lifespan, GigOptix has an optimized version of its EO material to address the long term reliability performance needs. This material is currently undergoing an extensive testing program. GigOptix plans to migrate all its EO products to this material by end of Q4'09 and be in production parts in 2010.

Another test of the EO polymers stability over temperature was addressed in a joint project targeting technologies for supercomputing. To reach the computational speeds demanded by the enormous amounts of data to be analyzed and to keep the power consumption to a manageable level these next generation systems require super cooling down to a few Kelvin. High speed optical modulators will enable the ultra fast switching needed and so must be proven to work under super cooling.

The operation and key parameters of GigOptix packaged pre-production modulators were tested at the extreme temperature of 30K or -243deg Celsius. The devices maintained performance, confirming that the technology is suitable for applications related to energy saving in large data centers as well as other challenging environments such as aerospace and satellite communications.

Pre-production parts are available immediately.