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LWLG- The Tip of the SiPh Spear
CMOS foundries respond slowly to PIC platforms
Some say definitively that hybrid silicon photonics is far from a true CMOS play. Firstly, they point out, PDK libraries are incomplete and not optimized and foundries still expect users to characterize the building blocks.
Others give a more muted response. SiPh foundries are “pretty fixed in their PDKs and recipes because they run in CMOS,” says Michael Lebby. “When you’re a photonics company and have photonics dimensions, components, and designs, it doesn’t automatically fit. It’s actually difficult for the photonics industry to change their recipes/designs to fit the foundry PDKs? Sometimes it’s yes, sometimes it’s no.”
A big concern is whether silicon CMOS foundries are flexible enough for novel modulator/PIC platforms. “It’s an interesting question,” says Lebby. “We’ve seen foundries doing some good work. But this is the start and may require an effort to engineer through, or are we going to have problems?” Silicon foundries are attempting to take all of the new materials—like thin-film lithium niobate, barium titanate, plasmonics, indium phosphide, and others—and integrate them into CMOS platforms. “It’s not easy,” Lebby says.
Another point is that as an industry, silicon photonics still hasn’t clearly defined “hybrid.” For Lebby, it means it isn’t a pure play—it involves a different material. “It can be either frontend or backend,” he explains. “And the reason I say backend is if you look at the electronics industry, we’ve really gone to chip-scale packaging and the photonics industry is definitely heading in that direction. Chip-scale PICs, getting rid of the gold box packaging and the traditional package, chip-on-board and these types of directions are becoming increasingly important.” The packaging ecosystem doesn’t really exist in silicon photonics.
A further sticking point is that modeling software is “at best fair in silicon photonics,” Peter Winzer adds. Tape-outs are low in silicon photonics and it can take nine to 12 months to get chips back. MPWs (multi-project wafers) take even longer and it’s frustrating because it gets into a cycle of iteration, which is needed because there is no ‘first time is right’ design in silicon photonics.”
The IP vendor ecosystem that exists in digital CMOS and to some extent in analog CMOS doesn’t really exist in silicon photonics.
And finally, Winzer continues, “some of the foundries you tape-out with in silicon photonics, if you ask them: ‘Can I scale this up to several thousand wafers per year?’ They say: ‘not with me,’ and you’re stuck because you can’t transfer what you just developed with them to another foundry. You start from the very beginning, running test chips, running your test structures, and the whole development process starts from scratch.”
What has been LWLG’s role in this process and have they, in fact, facilitated solutions and worked passed these hurdles. LWLG’s E-O polymer modulators are compatible in Silicon, InP and GaAs foundries, although silicon offers the best opportunities to scale volume quickly and efficiently. The company is partnering with multiple foundries, packaging partners and module/transceiver partners to position LWLG for future high-volume production. They are also partnering to qualify polymer Process Development Kits (PDKs) with foundries using standard CMOS fabrication techniques. These deep activities with foundries for volume scaling appear to be bearing fruit as LWLG’s polymer slot modulator is in a CMOS/silicon compatible PDK.
Some wait with bated breath and the expectation that the answers will shortly be forthcoming, some just wait patiently .
The most important article I’ve read in the last twelve moths presenting the current state of SiPH and InP base materials and what obstacles hybrids and PICs face in CMOS foundries.
Polymer Hybrid SiPh poised to save the data center
The advent of hybrid silicon photonics (SiPh) technology has fueled an exciting breakthrough in price/performance for fiber optics. But it requires revolutionary advances in wafer-level testing.
Hybrid SiPh chips present a test challenge: on both the transmitter and receiver sides, the chip must interface with light sources in the outside world. These input and output ports require extremely accurate fiber positioning to both propagate and capture the light going in and out of the silicon photonics device.
Moving Silicon Photonics from the Lab to the Fab
The first wave of the Hybrid SiPh revolution stands poised to roll over data centers around the world with optical interconnects that breach the barriers set by copper wire. End user benefits might include an HD movie or 100 hours of music downloaded in a single second. Bandwidths of a terabit per second now come within practical reach.
In essence, silicon photonics merges two technologies-integrated circuits and optical communications, which have evolved along parallel but separate paths. Each offers distinct advantages. Silicon-based IC fabrication now integrates literally billions of transistors onto a single substrate. Laser-based optical communications produce very high bandwidths and low-loss signal transmission over long distances. When combined via hybrid SiPh, they offer new possibilities in transmission speed, scalability, energy efficiency and cost reduction.
Optical fibers must be precisely aligned to couple light in and out of a wafer without physical contact. Hybrid SiPh permits both logical and optical components to coexist on the same wafer. Optical devices such as lasers, waveguide structures, detectors, multiplexers and others could interface directly with classic logic components or can be combined as separate ICs through advanced 2.5D and 3D integration techniques. This new level of integration permits the fabrication of hybrid devices that can be mass produced and interconnected via optical fiber cabling at very low cost while yielding substantial performance gains.
Moving to a New Paradigm in Wafer Test
Typically, hybrid SiPh includes on-chip I/O devices in the form of etched diffraction gratings, which route the light from off-chip optical fibers to waveguides within the chip, where operations such as filtering and conversion to digital data streams are performed.
This addition of optical I/O, along with electrical, adds an entirely new dimension to wafer test methodologies. The need to capture and insert modulated beams of light requires the development of novel probing strategies that accommodate a new set of mechanical requirements. The classic problem of maintaining accurate physical probe contact with pads on the wafer surface gives way to a new paradigm when optical fibers must be precisely aligned to couple light in and out of a wafer without physical contact.
Alliances Hold the Key to SiPh Test Solutions
Developing successful approaches to SiPh wafer test devices requires partnerships between key suppliers of test technology that play on each contributor’s individual strengths.
Andy Grove, the legendary CEO of Intel, recognized a decade ago that the focus must be less on “the mythical moment of creation” and more on bringing innovations to market. “This is the phase where companies scale up,” he wrote in an influential article in 2010. “They work out design details, figure out how to make things affordably, build factories, and hire people by the thousands.”
Testing silicon photonics is complicated
Conclusion
Silicon photonics is being used in more designs to provide high-throughput data pathways with low heat, but standards for designing, manufacturing, and especially testing this technology have been slow to follow. That’s beginning to change.
“We are finally seeing the industry develop modifications to standard test equipment in order to support testing of high-density optical engines,” said Manish Mehta, vice president of marketing and operations, Optical Systems Division at Broadcom. “It is critically important over the next three to five years that test equipment developers continue to invest in the space because testability is going to be a key part of the industry’s ability to scale.”
As Advantest’s Armstrong summed it up: “We need standards, but they need to be cost-effective. The test has to be short and sweet, but thorough.”
Testing silicon photonics is becoming more critical and more complicated as the technology is used in new applications ranging from medicine to cryptography, lidar, and quantum computing, but how to do that in a way that is both consistent and predictable is still unresolved.
Dave Armstrong, co-chairman of the Test TWIG of the Integrated Photonic Systems Roadmap (IPSR) and principal test strategist at Advantest America, pointed to some of the challenges that need to be tackled. “A comprehensive test solution needs four things —
optical positioning, optical instruments, a digital interface and control, and an analog thermal control interface and control,” he said.
“Most optical instruments have a heater built into them to control the wavelength, so the control loop of the heaters and the device temperature is a fourth domain you have to control in order to do an effective test of these devices.”
Standards: The Next Step For Silicon Photonics
Karen Heyman https://semiengineering.com March 7th, 2023
Then there’s Polymer Hybrid SiPh
The polymer hybrid silicon photonics space is a very dynamic and quickly evolving optical-electric sector. There are many players but one in particular, Lightwave Logic, stands out for
its imposing intellectual property moat,
its polymer E-O modulator figure of merit performance,
its on-going refinement of proprietary polymer Si-Ph PDKs and
its ever growing global thought leadership in the emerging PIC industry.
It seems reasonable to say that if one projects the accelerating number of development successes over the last two years that 2023 may finally see the company earn its first licensing revenues as it gets ever closer to mass commercialization.
a look see into what will be happening inside the data center
“We are on the cusp of a major technology transition as speed and power requirements demand that optics become the dominant interconnect in the datacenter,” explained Stan Reiss of Matrix Partners.
A Fairy Tale or Not?
Current modulators found within transceivers turn laser light into discrete 1’s and 0’s that carry information via fiber cable throughout the Internet’s mesh network. The data load on the Internet infrastructure, however, has reached the point where the network is throwing up periodic blockages and less than needed data rates. Along comes a small company named Lightwave Logic with its electro-optical polymers and a Photonic Industry thought leader CEO who develops industry roadmaps.
The Naysayers and naked shorts rise up in opposition and do their things. LWLG keeps its nose to the grindstone, hires PhD staff and enlarges its industry network partner relationships. Its polymers and modulator devices demonstrate that light can be switched 3x faster (creating larger bandwidth and faster data flow rates) than legacy semi-conductor modulators and do so at significantly less power consumption.
Some LWLG investors initiate a call for instant stockholder gratification and the technology be damned. They demand production at scale now and ignore that industry adoption, while gaining momentum, is not quite at a tipping point.
At the end of 2022, at several industry confabs, LWLG presented the results of third party research experiments in which its e-o polymers played pivotal roles in generating record speed switching results. The company’s 2023 roadmap includes, in part, turning those results into development prototypes which will be tested by its foundry, packaging and transceiver partners, then enhanced and refined as further steps in the ever closer goal of commercialization. To this point, LWLG’s CEO Michael Lebby expressed his vision of the time when “Polymers on the Internet will swap out semi-conductor modulators.”
"Polymers on the Internet will swap out semi-conductor modulators." -M Lebby vision 2-23
LWLG's Back Story
According to TalkTalk network data, internet usage has soared 40 percent over the past two years alone.
And, by 2025, the connectivity provider estimates that peak broadband usage will more than double,
which is why it's focused on rolling out future-proofed, affordable full-fibre packages at pace.
For the retail investor
The share price has NEVER been a reflection of company developments or progress.
It has ALWAYS reflected hopes vs fears - belief vs disbelief and doubts.
Some changes seem to be always around the corner and then they move faster than expected and you are caught flat-footed.
Who said that technological success is not uncommonly a long and winding road;
as much an evolutionary as a revolutionary progression?
the rising data center economy
McKinsey & Co January 17, 2023
Investing in the rising data center economy
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/investing-in-the-rising-data-center-economy?stcr=E58DC720C375424D93D6F4035C50C294&cid=other-eml-alt-mip-mck&hlkid=54975f925e1c4c46a5c40b30000828bd&hctky=2579570&hdpid=16686342-db6d-4c9c-a98b-b550b589e172#
Private investors have snapped up data centers in recent years, but plenty of other potential investment opportunities in the sector’s value chain may be going unnoticed.
LWLG’s Back Story Redux 1-23
Connectivity is critical
This need for connectivity is shared across industry verticals and across continents. While networks are adapting to enable more advanced infrastructure approaches to sending and receiving data, the fundamental need for access to that data remains. Organizations must transport data to locations both far and near, and they rely on their networks to keep them connected at all times.
DCI: the backbone of the digital world
Modern life relies on data centers. Hidden from most, these physical facilities are the backbone of the internet, storing and computing information for every industry, enabling data backup and recovery, business continuity plans, cloud-based services and applications. From emails to entertainment streaming, our daily lives are built on data centers. But data centers are not “islands.” They need to be interconnected to share or back up data or to balance workloads. The success of the applications running over them depends not only on the performance of the data centers themselves but also on the connectivity between them. This is what the industry calls data center interconnect or DCI.
Security and availability are key
DCI networks have to transport enormous amounts of traffic, which often needs to be safeguarded from malicious cyberattacks and always available.
High-capacity data center interconnect networks
DWDM enables multiple signals to be combined and transmitted at different wavelengths on the same fiber pair, facilitating the transparent transport of multiple Terabits of data. Now, to tackle soaring data demand, enterprises and carriers have gone a step further and adopted coherent transport technology. Flexible and programmable coherent interfaces enable the maximum capacity-reach wavelength performance over any type of network infrastructure, leading to the lowest cost per bit. Other key factors besides system capacity are simplicity of network design as well as operational simplicity. Enterprises and carriers must be able to deploy and manage DCI networks with as little complexity and effort as possible. Other parameters like latency also play a vital role, particularly for enterprise DCI applications such as trading and business continuity between sites.
>>>>> Note: Coherent optical technology forms the foundation of the industry's drive to achieve transport speeds of 100G and beyond, delivering Terabits of information ... At its most basic, coherent optical transmission is a technique that uses modulation of the amplitude and phase of the light, as well as transmission across two polarizations, to enable the transport of considerably more information through a fiber optic cable. Coherent optics is a specific type of laser technology used by service providers to transmit large amounts of information over fiber optic networks. Coherent technology uses the three degrees of freedom (amplitude, phase and polarization of light) to focus more data on the wave that is ... <<<<<
LWLG’s Three Pronged Disruptor
Proprietary Electro-Optic Polymer Chemistry
High-speed Modulator Leveraging Electro-optic Polymer
Photonic Integration Platform Technology
LWLG is a volatile stock.
The price will continue to go up and down,
despite strengthening fundamentals and milestones achieved.
As potential morphs into technical validation and LWLG’s vision becomes reality,
one might expect the stock price to go up a lot more than it goes down.
But no one can consistently predict the future.
Don’’t Lose Sight Lebby providing technical leadership, strategy and vision
Who will buy LWLG’s modulators after successfully scaling PICs for volume production?
Is it the Perkinamine that is being sold or the polymers containing the Perkinamines?
LWLG’s Unique Mission cont’d
Lightwave Logic Inc. (LWLG) is on a Unique Mission
No other company besides LWLG has the enhanced polymer recipes as well as a protective moat of electro-optical polymer and modulator patents that are capable of powering the upcoming internet transformation. The company’s epic evolutionary journeys will soon delivery revolutionary outcomes. A summary highlight of recent milestones includes:
LWLG’s on-going acquisitions enhance and thrust forward the scale of expertise required for simplified E-O polymer manufacturing.
Many large Tier 1 companies and small optoelectronic startups are testing, experimenting, designing in and breaking photonics industry world records utilizing LWLG’s Perkinamine chromophores that enable its polymers with unique light functionalities. At the same time, several foundries are closely supporting the company to simplify its E-O polymer modulator manufacturing process. These fabs have initialized LWLG’s PDKs into test production runs as the near concluding steps before commercial production.
On the backend of foundry manufacturing, the company continues to collaborate with its packaging partner to hermetically enclose its polymer modulators. To further accelerate its in-house commercialization process, LWLG expanded its laboratory space by approximately 9,000 square feet. And it continues to hire world class PhD level lab staff to focus exclusively on reliability testing to provide significant evaluation data to ensure ubiquitous acceptance and adoption of its polymers and devices.
Initial work with a fiber optic transceiver partner is underway to demonstrate E-O polymer modulator performance capabilities. LWLG’s modulators are targeted for data center interconnect (DIC) transceivers functioning at 10 km and beyond.
The company stated in their year-end 2022 corporate update that, “While we have not given guidance on all our technical and business achievements in 2022, these major technical based achievements reaffirm our view that our technologies are not only vastly superior in performance but are simple to implement as well - making them the right platform for next-generation optical systems for years to come.”
In closing, when all of the milestones achieved in 2022 are taken together with a new cadence of catalysts anticipated in 2023, one may well expect that a long awaited initial polymer licensing agreement will be signed.
To boldly go where no one has gone before, the company’s mission avowal is to create and provide with its partners the next-generation of photonic technologies that will support and facilitate the global internet infrastructure of the future.
Lightwave Logic Inc. (LWLG) is on a Unique Mission
Big Tech Has a Patent Violation Problem
Paul R. Michel https://hbr.org August 05, 2022
https://hbr.org/2022/08/big-tech-has-a-patent-violation-problem
Summary. In the U.S., large tech companies regularly infringe on smaller companies’ intellectual property (IP). Often, this has led to large court settlements that punish larger companies. But, this enforcement mechanism has been...
Look at LWLG's stock chart for a sense of where the price may go next,
in particular,
StochRSI
Slow Stochastic
RSI
Williams % R
A good find for the whole group.
Following and keeping up with the LWLG story, a work in progress,
feels like doing graduate school work.
In-house Reliability Testing Upgrade.
We have intensified our reliability testing and expanded our laboratory space by approximately 9,000 square feet.
We continue to look for world class technical staff and have recently hired multiple PhD level lab staff to focus exclusively on reliability testing - all with the goal of expediting data sets that are needed for commercialization with end-users.
We expect to have this data in hand during 2023, laying the foundation for performance demonstrations in 2023.
Another key message
get one's ducks in a row
to plan carefully and be ready for the next step;
to be well prepared for something that is going to happen;
to ensure that all of the small details are accounted for and in their proper positions
It is a pure-play InP foundry.
What is the connection with LWLG's polymers?
A figure of merit is a quantity used to characterize the performance of a device, system or method, relative to its alternatives. In engineering, figures of merit are often defined for particular materials or devices in order to determine their relative utility for an application.
How many more patents needed before LWLG receives PDK green light for foundry commercialization?
3, 7 or 12?
Thanks for your analysis and thoughts.
Tech success is a long and winding road.
GF’s Multi-Project Wafer (MPW) Program offers cost-competitive vehicles for prototyping, device characterization, IP validation, and design enablement. A wide portfolio of technology nodes is supported with shuttles available from mature process geometries to the industry's leading-edge technology nodes.
Is It Finally Time for Silicon Photonics to Shine?
James Morra www.electronicdesign.com July 13, 2022
from an earlier post
GlobalFoundries plans to complete qualification of GF Fotonix to support a production ramp-up by 2024.
How important is the hybrid polymer-SiPh engine patent and is it the key to finalizing foundry PDKs?
A lot of people are not following the technological progress being made at LWLG.
Or am I wrong?
What Is The Difference Between LED And Laser Diode?
Eugen https://ledlightinginfo.com November 17, 2020
...LEDs and lasers both emit photons to produce light. LED light is more dispersed and multi-directional, while laser light is highly focused, making them specialized in their function. Lasers are used in optics and electronics, while LEDs are the go-to for illumination.
Just a Reminder
Typical Optical Interconnection Scenarios of Data Centers
Data centers are energy-intensive industries. Due to the constraints of power supply and the surrounding environment, the scale of a single data center cannot be expanded infinitely. The extensive application of modern virtualization technology enables multiple physically separated data centers to work like a virtual data center, and large Internet companies can share the load among multiple data centers and services, effectively reducing the data center’s demand for power supply, and facilitating rapid deployment. In addition, in consideration of disaster recovery and backup, many large data centers are composed of multiple sites, between which a large number of low-latency data exchange channels are required. The above application scenarios all place strong demands on DCI.
Note: DCI (Data Center Interconnect) technology connects two or more data centers together over short, medium, or long distances using high-speed packet-optical connectivity.
The DCI distance is generally several kilometers to tens of kilometers, or even more than 100 kilometers. Typical interconnection scenarios are as follows:
(a) DCI-Campus: Connect to a data center at a short distance. The transmission distance is usually about 2km, and further expand to a longer distance of 10km;
(b) DCI-Edge: Distributed data center in the connection area. The transmission distance is usually 80km~120km;
(c) Metro/Long Haul: It is further extended to the metropolitan area and long-distance transmission, and the distance can reach hundreds or thousands of kilometers. In order to make full use of optical fiber resources, dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) technology is widely used, and different modulation codes can be used for different transmission distances. In addition, although not part of the DCI infrastructure, wireless networking is also being integrated into the data center network.
Patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets are the 4 types of intellectual property, all valuable assets of the company.
Continued upward price pressure comes as the outsized level of liquidations in short trades (wagers on falling prices) fuel a short squeeze in stock prices Of note, liquidations take effect when an exchange shuts down a trader's levered and beaten down position since the trader doesn't have sufficient funds to meet margin requirements to keep the losing trade running.