For 40 years the Industry has tried unsuccessfully! >>
IBM, Lockheed Martin, DuPont, AT&T Bell Labs, Honeywell, Motorola, HP, 3M, and others in addition to numerous universities and U.S. Government Agencies, have attempted to produce high-performance, high-stability electro-optic polymers <<<< literally in the Billions R&D $$ were spent to try to do what LWLG has done!
So LWLG's technology has been successfully developed in about 25% of the time of what the Industry spent, and at a cost less than 5% of what the Industry spent screwing around with unstable fragile molecules for 40 years!
Electro-Optic Polymer Production – Our Approach vs. the BLA Approach
LWLG's P2IC Platform is cheaper ($1/Gb) & better (lower power 1v) & scalable (100Gbs to 400Gbs to 800Gbs and beyond!)
Brief polymer history…
• <1980s
– Strong government funding for non-linear electro-optic organic
polymers (DARPA, NSF, DOE, DoD etc.)
– Many papers, reports, books
• 1980s – 2000s
– Heavy, focused, and increased gvt funding for non-linear EO organic
polymers (DARPA, NSF, DOE, DoD, USAirForce, USNavy, USArmy, EU)
– Industry R&D lab funding e.g. Du Pont, Dow, Akzo Nobel, IBM, Intel,
Boeing, Motorola, AT&T Bell Labs, GE, Lockheed etc.
– Increase in papers, publications, conferences, and books
• 2000s – 2010s
– Wane in government funding and industrial R&D lab activity
– Limited commercialization in fiber based communications
• >2010s
– Excellent progress on high speed performance (>100Gbaud)
– Resurgence?
Lots of us worked with polymers…then we moved on…
Slide 24
In Slide 24 above we see that Polymers have been under development since at least the 1980's and the Industry and Government combined have invested over a Billion $$ to-date with no real success, but ALL of this was with 1st and 2nd generation materials, the BEST of which was CLD (Cheng-LarryDalton) that was Lumera/Gig/BrP, but they all had the same inherent problem >>> FRAGILE MOLECULE LACKING STABILITY (thermal & photochemical/bleaching)
LWLG inventor Fred Goetz took an opposite approach, he started with something inherently STABILE, a plastic, and worked to make it E/O active, the result was a 3rd generation Polymer that is LWLG
Read below to understand why LWLG has succeeded now, and YES they have succeeded, just need to be accepted and this rocket will launch !!
Paradox of Electro-Optics
Certain materials are made of robust molecules and their electrons are so strongly bound in the molecular structure that it is difficult for them to vibrate or breakaway.
Such materials may be robust but generally their electrons do not vibrate easily. By analogy, a beer-mug may be thick -walled but it would be much more difficult for our soprano to vibrate it with his or her voice.
This has been the dilemma of electro -optics. Creating a molecule in which an electron can oscillate freely back and forth when hit by light but which does not wildly vibrate the material toward its own resonant destruction.
Second-generation electro-optics are fragile like champagne flutes It was a daunting challenge. Scientists had been working on the problem since the 1960's and by the late -90's most everyone had deemed the task impossible, just as it is infeasible to merge the delicate vibration character of a champagne flute with a Hamburg beer stein.
Second-Generation
Second-generation electro-optic polymers are excellent high -
performance electron oscillators.Their long fluted shape however makes them highly unstable and unreliable.
Most scientists had been trying to make more slender and delicate "molecular flutes" that would vibrate easily, blindly hoping that they would somehow, someday figure out how to stabilize these molecular structures. This thin and delicate class of molecules has become known as second-generation electro-optic materials.
Third-Generation (LWLG)
Meanwhile, the scientists at LWLG continued quietly and
indefatigably toward the Holy Grail, the Fluted Stein. A molecule that was robust and yet which would vibrate more easily than the thinnest sliver of crystal. Once thought impossible,LWLG succeeded on their quest, producing today's third-generation of electro-optic molecules. LWLG scientists accomplished this by stabilizing the core of the molecule with interlocking atomic rings, much like crosshatches or the rungs of a ladder.
Third-generation electro-optic materials are even higher performing as electron oscillators. Their ring-locked shape gives them tremendous stability. Within these structures the electrons still vibrate easily, in fact they oscillate significantly better than within second -generation materials, yet they are incredibly robust due to their reinforced scaffold-like structure.
