Industrialization of PLC splitter chip technology

Fiber optic communication network has become the cornerstone of today’s world of information transfer. With the further development of the network and market demand for communication bandwidth increases, the entire communication network to the part between the user’s last ten km and last km, the network part is also being optical fiber. FTTH becomes an important direction of the development of fiber optic communication network.

FTTH mainly uses PON network technology, which requires a large number of low-cost optical splitters and other optical passive. Optical splitter device is an integral part of FTTH, and with the promotion of FTTH, there would be a great market demand. The traditional preparation of optical splitter technology is fiber fused biconical taper (FBT) technology. Its characteristics are mature and simple technology. The disadvantage is that the assigned ones too large, and the device size is too large, which causedthe decrease in yield and the rising cost of single channel, shunt reactive stars uniformity will deteriorate. FBT technology based fiber optic splitter preparation techniques have been unable to adapt to the market demand.

As you can see from the perspective of development of optical devices, PLC technology has become a mainstream technology for large-scale preparation of high-performance and low-cost optical splitter. It is the use of PLC technology, to produce the optical splitter chip, coupled with the optical fiber array package, complete the preparation of the optical splitter. Its features are: small size of the device, the cost is relatively low, splitter good uniformity, at the same time, the technical threshold is relatively high, especially for production of more than large ones optical splitter, suitable for mass production. It can ensure that the light emitting device miniaturization, low cost and high performance. Analysis of PLC technology, you can see that the glass-based PLC technology has great advantages in terms of equipment investment, production costs, the optimal choice of production required for fiber-to-the-home, low-cost optical devices such as optical splitter.

International, PLC technology has been widely used in the miniaturization, high-performance optical device fabrication and production, in particular, the optical splitter chip. In China, however, the reality is that we have become a PLC encapsulation big country, but is limited to the optical splitter and optical device fabrication device coupled packaging and downstream industry chain, no one PLC chip Health line, PLC core device chip entirely dependent on imports. Which there is a problem that the core preparation technique of the PLC device lies in the outward, this has resulted in major cost control of the device is limited in the chip at the same time, which also led to the lack of technical support further to the high-end integrated chip development, severe hinder the development of our country in the PLC application.

PLC splitter chip manufacturing process PECVD (plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition) and FHD (flame hydrolysis deposition) and ion exchange. The former two with the substrate material is a silicon-based silica, and the latter with the substrate material is glass. AWG (arrayed waveguide grating) chip production, Silica optical waveguide splitter chips can be produced on silica on silicon waveguide or glass waveguide. Production by ion exchange glass waveguide PLC chip domestic number of colleges and universities have been conducting research and development, technical appraisal sample has been reached the international advanced level of similar products. The breakthrough of the results from the glass material, preparation equipment, process conditions designed to chip a full range of core technology to master the the buried low loss and low polarization characteristics PLC chip core preparation techniques.

Characteristics of the technology investment, equipment operation and low maintenance costs, simple process conditions, the production of optical passive low transmission loss and polarization characteristics with matching coupling of the fiber loss, environmental stability, and manufacturing costs low, very suitable in need of the PLC production line, can be used for producing low-cost fiber-to-the-home integrated optical splitter chip. Further pilot research and development, to solve adapted to the production of core technology, will be able to achieve your PLC splitter chip mass production.

In fact, in addition to the production of optical splitter chip, glass-based PLC technology R & D production environment with a wide range of other potential applications, for example, can be applied to detect the required light sensor.