Optoelectronics company Intense Photonics has announced a strategic partnership with the III-V wafer specialist IQE. The partnership involves the design, modeling, and growth of complex compound semiconductor crystal structures and will help shorten Intense Photonics' path to market for its photonic integrated circuits.
"Wafer growth is a critical element in our supply chain, and the alliance with IQE is helping to maintain our momentum to full commercial operations by eliminating the effort and cost involved in setting up this specialist process in house," explains Intense Photonics' Jim Ashe, vice president of marketing worldwide. "We chose IQE because of its focus on III-V materials, and the extensive development expertise that it is able to bring to bear to help us maximize yields and performance as we commercialize our quantum well intermixing process for photonic ICs."
IQE will be providing gallium arsenide (GaAs) and indium phosphide (InP) based epitaxy structures to support Intense Photonics' work in component sectors, including pump lasers and photonic switches for the C- and L-bands.
IQE is an outsource supplier of III-V epiwafers, offering a range of materials produced using MOCVD (Metal Organic Chemical Vapour Deposition) and MBE (Molecular Beam Epitaxy) crystal growth platforms. IQE's European manufacturing facility and international HQ is based in Cardiff UK, a few hundred miles from Intense Photonics' wafer fabrication facility in High Blantyre. The strategic partnership will help to support efficient manufacturing as Intense Photonics ramps up production.
The company has already started delivering trial wafers, which are being used by Intense Photonics' design team for prototyping purposes, and by the operations department to help commission the QWI wafer fabrication line which is currently being installed.
Intense Photonics holds the intellectual property rights to optical component design ideas and manufacturing techniques--developed and refined over more than a decade at Glasgow University--that allow multiple optical communication functions to be combined on a single chip. For more information, visit the company's Web site at www.intensephotonics.com.
Additional information about IQE and its products may be found at www.iqep.com.