Mixed fortunes: start-up bucks the telecoms trend

17 Jun 2002

Despite the downturn, some telecoms start-ups are flourishing. Jacqueline Hewett visits one of them.

From Opto & Laser Europe February 2002

Intense Photonics is a confident company - and with good reason. While many major telecoms companies are suffering in the economic slowdown, Intense Photonics, which makes optical telecoms components, has secured significant first-round funding. In contrast with the fate of many of its peers, the 18-month-old start-up has recently moved to a new state-of-the-art fabrication facility and is preparing to ramp up production over the coming months. It is also actively recruiting and looks set to double its workforce by the end of the year.

The firm's first product is an array of 980 nm indium gallium arsenide pump lasers. Although Intense Photonics admits that it is just one of a huge number of companies making pump lasers, it believes that its quantum-well intermixing (QWI) technology will help it to succeed.The pump lasers contain non-absorbing mirrors that prevent overheating of the laser facets, making them more reliable and easier to package. Jim Ashe, Intense Photonics' vice-president for sales and marketing, said: "These additional features are inherent benefits of the QWI technology and are what will set us apart from our competitors in the same field."

The process, developed by the firm's co-founders John Marsh and Craig Hamilton at the University of Glasgow, will enable the integration of multiple optical communication functions onto a single chip. In May 2000 Intense Photonics was spun out of the university, which took an equity stake in return for an exclusive license to its QWI patent portfolio and technology.

With this agreement in place, coupled with £1 million of seedcorn funding and a further first-round award of £7.75 million (EURO12.6 million), Intense Photonics began to seek a location. Owing to the downturn in the semiconductor market, DuPont Photomasks, a supplier of photomasks to the lithography industry, had just pulled out of its state-of-the-art fabrication facility near Glasgow. It had a Class 1 cleanroom and provided substantial space for future expansion. Intense Photonics bought the facility and opened its doors late last year.

The firm now has 40 employees and expects to double its workforce by the end of 2002, reflecting its swelling confidence in its ability to market and sell its technology in the telecoms environment.

As demand for optical networks shifts from long-haul to metropolitan, the firm plans to offer customized integrated photonics circuits. "Intense Photonics has been established to catalyse the next stage in the evolution of the high-speed optical communications components market - the migration to monolithic, multifunction components," said Ashe.

As a stepping stone towards this goal, the firm has launched the pump-laser array. It has been released in prototype volumes and shipped to potential customers involved in dense wavelength-division multiplexing. This summer, after just six months in its new facility, Intense Photonics hopes to ramp up production of the laser array.

This product has been brought to market quickly to increase the company's profile, generate immediate revenue and give the firm production experience. The long-term goal is to develop more complex components using the QWI process.

The firm's pioneering and complex technology has been recognized by the Scottish Executive, which awarded it a SpurPlus grant of £450 000 to develop an optoelectronic packet switch - key for future all-optical communications networks.

This project will result in an optical component with both passive and active elements integrated onto a single chip. The QWI process is ideal for this, as it is a means of obtaining perfectly aligned active-passive butt joints. Researchers at Intense Photonics have already successfully integrated both active and passive components onto an InP substrate. The integration of passive components, such as long interconnecting waveguide sections for signal routing, and active elements, such as modulators and signal detectors, is in the pipeline.

This ambitious project is expected to last for 18 months and if successful it could yield one of the most highly integrated optical components ever made. If Intense Photonics is able to match its achievements in its first 18 months of operation, it looks poised to become a prominent player in the telecoms market-place.

At the heart of Intense Photonics' technology is a proprietary quantum-well intermixing (QWI) process for compound semiconductors that facilitates sophisticated bandgap engineering, typically allowing the bandgap to be increased. Intense Photonics has chosen QWI as its fabrication platform to allow multiple optical communications components, such as lasers, and functions, such as amplifiers and switches, to be integrated onto a monolithic chip.

In semiconductor devices, electrons typically move to the lowest-energy state. Materials can be grown to specifically "trap" electrons in areas known as quantum wells that represent the lowest-energy state. Because quantum wells are just a few atom layers thick, they are governed by quantum mechanics and only specific energies and bandgaps are permitted.

Depositing additional layers onto the original structure in the form of a cap and then heating the whole device can alter quantum wells. Atoms are excited by the heat and are drawn towards the cap layer, leaving vacancies in the structure and intermixing the quantum wells across the wafer. This intermixing alters the bandgap of the material and allows a single wafer to perform a number of functions. The QWI technique used at Intense is "impurity free", which avoids optical absorption.

Intense Photonics www.intensephotonics.com