AXSUN-BERKELEY LAB PARTNERSHIP WILL ENABLE SMALLER, FASTER
OPTICAL NETWORKING IN TELECOMMUNICATIONS
Contacts: Ron Kolb at LBNL, rrkolb@lbl.gov,: 510-486-7586
Corinne Fandel at AXSUN, 978-262-0049 xxt. 133
BERKELEY, CA -- X-rays produced by the Advanced Light Source
(ALS) at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory will play a key role in enabling AXSUN
Technologies to fabricate advanced micro-electromechanical
structures (MEMS) used in the assembly of integrated photonic
products.
The critical first step of creating miniature molds for
micro-structure components takes place in a beamline at the ALS,
one of the world's leading producers of soft X-rays. The beamline
was built for use by AXSUN Technologies, of Billerica, Mass., and
was dedicated today by the laboratory and AXSUN officials. It
marks the first time that a private company has paid for an
entire ALS beamline.
"It's a win-win for both parties, and illustrates the great value
of public-private partnerships," said Charles Shank, Director of
Berkeley Lab. "The output of this beamline will help address one
of our nation's biggest telecommunications challenges, and at the
same time, AXSUN's support will increase our capacity to deliver
on other scientific missions."
Dale Flanders, President and CEO of AXSUN, said, "AXSUN has been
working with the Berkeley Lab since before the company's founding
in 1999, and we are pleased to be extending our partnership to
include the operation of an AXSUN beamline. We believe that the
relationship between the Berkeley Lab and AXSUN will serve as a
model for future commercialization of dual use technology."
AXSUN, which has been in operations since 1999 and opened a West
Coast manufacturing branch in Livermore this year, is a developer
and manufacturer of photonic subsystems for optical networking.
Their products address a major obstacle in optimizing the
performance of fiber-optic networks that power the Internet:
specifically to offer complex, integrated subsystems that occupy
smaller footprints than today's bulkier, discrete versions.
AXSUN's products, such as its optical performance monitor, are
designed to manage optical networks through the integration of
advanced MEMS devices with a wide range of supporting optical
functions. AXSUN's subsystem products are one-tenth the size of
those built by hand, using bulk optics methods. The result is
higher levels of performance and functional density while
consuming less power and circuit board space.
Key to this process is the production of micro-alignment
structures used to mount optical elements such as the lenses to
the optical equivalent of a circuit board. That's where the
Advanced Light Source beamline comes in.
The ALS has proven to be the ideal vehicle for enabling a process
called LIGA, a technology developed in Germany that uses X-ray
lithography instead of conventional metal machining to create
tiny metal structures with sub-micron precision. The ALS X-rays
are exposed to an acrylic sheet, which is bonded to a silicon
wafer containing a mask of the LIGA structures. After the X-rays
hit the mask, the acrylic is etched in a manner that creates
precise molds of micro-alignment structures. Dale Boehme,
Director of LIGA Technology for AXSUN, said, "The ALS is a great
synchrotron source for performing LIGA X-ray exposures because it
provides maximum power radiated at energies ideal for exposing
these molds."
The exposed acrylic wafers will be sent to AXSUN's Livermore
foundry, where they will be chemically processed, electroplated,
lapped and polished, and released from the substrate. This wafer
scale process creates thousands of alignment structures on a
single 3-inch wafer. The structures are then assembled into the
photonic platforms.
The 14,000-square-foot office and manufacturing facility at 7693
Longard Road in East Livermore opened in March, and will serve as
AXSUN's West Coast headquarters and LIGA fabrication hub. AXSUN
executed a licensing agreement last year for certain LIGA process
technology with Sandia National Laboratory, another DOE facility
in Livermore, and is continuing to work with Sandia as a research
and development partner.
Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source is a national user facility
that generates intense light for scientific and technological
research. As the world's brightest source of ultraviolet and soft
X-ray beams—and the world's premiere third-generation synchrotron
light source in its energy range –the ALS welcomes researchers
from universities, industries, and government laboratories around
the world. The U.S Department of Energy's Office of Basic Energy
Sciences funds it.
Contributing to the construction of the AXSUN beamline at
Berkeley Lab, under the technical direction of Howard Padmore and
project management of Jim Krupnick, were William Thur and Sergio
Gavidia. Padmore said, "The path to an industrial LIGA facility
at ALS started in 1994 with the programs on two existing
time-shared beamlines. The use of LIGA for a dedicated industrial
production facility is something that the ALS management strongly
backed over the years. It is particularly satisfying to see this
project come to fruition working with Dale Boehme at AXSUN, who
was responsible for much of this early development work."
Berkeley Lab is an unclassified scientific research laboratory
managed by the University of California for the Department of
Energy. |
