The Luna Quarterly

Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) have revolutionized many key industries such as telecommunications, optical computing, aerospace, defense, automotive, and medical.

It has become possible to combine various optical devices on a single silicon photonics chip, minimizing cost, as well as environmental footprint all while avoiding complicated assembly operations. PICs offer more functionality, reliability, and scalability than discrete systems, making them ideal for large-scale production needs.

PICs, however, are complex systems and pose many technical and testing challenges. For example, the huge structural birefringence, geometrical anisotropy and fabrication inaccuracies make them prone to polarization sensitivity. Polarization handling is becoming very crucial. Manual alignment of the state of polarization (SOP) to study the characteristics of the guided transverse‐electrical (TE) and transverse‐magnetic (TM) modes can be very challenging and time consuming.

Luna Innovations has developed advanced polarization control products, with a pre-defined and automated polarization alignment function, to help customers reduce the testing time and accelerate the product introduction to market. With a proper feedback signal, Luna’s polarization controllers drive the SOP “automatically” to either maximize or minimize a feedback, switching between the TE and TM modes in less than 20 microseconds.

Read more about Luna's polarization management solutions here and about PIC and Silicon Photonics Testing here.