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- February 2002 -
February 18th, 2002
Southampton Photonics' $10 million specialty fiber manufacturing facility begins operations
In-house control of fiber manufacture is in line with company's business plan
Los Gatos, CA. January 24 2002. In-fiber optical components and subsystems vendor, Southampton Photonics (SPI), has opened its specialty optical fiber manufacturing facility at Hedge End, near Southampton, UK. The plant, which represents an investment of approximately $10 million, occupies part of the company's new 30,000 square foot premises and will primarily provide specialty fiber for use in its own products.
Specialty fiber is a term encompassing those fiber products used for specialist applications as opposed to the high volume transmission fiber used throughout the communications networks. Specialty fiber comes in many forms, each with its own particular specification and application. For example, the core of the fiber can be doped with rare-earth elements such as Erbium or Ytterbium for use in active fiber products such as fiber amplifiers and distributed feedback fiber lasers, or it may have a specific refractive index for use in passive photonics components.
Don Spalinger, SPI's Senior Vice President, commented, "It is inherent in our Application Specific Fiber Platform that all of our components are based on specialty fiber, and having control of its manufacture is critical to the success of our business. Consequently, we are delighted to have the most up to date drawing facilities in the industry. Furthermore, the team which brought this project to fruition, led by Dr Steve Norman who joined us from Pirelli last year, is one the most experienced in the world."
Until now, SPI has made use of the fiber drawing facility at the University of Southampton's Optoelectronic Research Centre, although an in-house capability has always formed part of the company's business plan.
The Hedge End facility includes a purpose-built suite of clean rooms for fiber manufacture that are serviced with high-purity process gases and chemicals, and by ambient temperature and humidity control and environmental management systems. The state-of-the-art fiber-manufacturing equipments include a dual-line, 11.5 metre drawing tower, MCVD (Modified Chemical Vapour Deposition) equipment for the manufacture of specialty fiber Preforms, and other associated specialist equipment such as a Preform profiler that measures the refractive index of the Preform glass rod and its core prior to drawing. Quality Assurance measurement systems are installed to enable full optical, mechanical and environmental performance tests on finished fibers.
The use of specialty fiber is growing rapidly and a recent forecast from ElectroniCast Corp suggests that its worldwide use will grow from $239 million in 2000 to $4.38 billion by 2010.
About Southampton Photonics
The company manufactures in-fiber optical components and subsystems based on its Application Specific Fiber Platform which allows the manufacture of reliable, high-performance in-fiber components and subsystems in volume. SPI's expertise is in specialty fiber, fiber Bragg grating design and fabrication, as well as amplifier and laser technology. These core technologies form the basis of the company's state-of-the-art components and subsystems, and make optical systems and networks more flexible, powerful and less expensive. Southampton Photonics’ in-fiber technology enables optical networks to transport more bits, over more channels, with greater accuracy, at a lower cost.
Technical detail
In common with standard optical transmission fiber made by the MCVD process, SPI’s specialty fiber starts life as a hollow cylindrical tube of silica glass about one metre in length. This is rotated slowly in the MCVD equipment where it is heated to sub-melting temperatures whilst precisely controlled quantities of various glass precursor gases are passed through it. They react to form ultra-pure glass particles, which are deposited onto the walls of the tube to form the special cladding and core layers of the specialty fiber Preform. The tube is subsequently heated to the high temperature required to transform the composite tube into a solid rod (called a Preform) having the desired refractive index and compositional structure for the application-specific fiber.
The Preform is then drawn at very high temperature (over 2100 degrees C) into fiber. In this process the Preform is clamped into a chuck at the top of the drawing tower where a concentric Graphite furnace heats it to just above its melting point. The fiber is drawn under computer-controlled conditions as molten glass from the Preform tip, passing from the top of the tower through optical gauges and systems for the application and curing of protective primary coatings before being wound onto a spooling drum at the bottom of the tower. Depending on the exact application and specification, the resultant fiber is typically 125 microns in diameter with a 250um diameter protective coating; the central core may be typically 6 microns in diameter.
Contacts:
Don Spalinger, Southampton Photonics, 170 Knowles Drive, Suite 2, Los Gatos,
CA 95032 Tel: +1 408-866-0472 x288
don.spalinger@southamptonphotonics.com
Geoff Boyes, EML, The Albany Boathouse, Lower Ham Road,
Kingston-Upon-Thames, Surrey, KT2 5BB, UK Tel: +44 (0) 20 8408 8000 geoffb@eml.com
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