Nanoscribe, a BICO company, received the ECOC Industry Award for its Quantum X align high-resolution 3D printer as the most innovative product in the "Chip-Scale Packaging / Optical Sub-Assembly" category. Jan Szabados, Product Manager at Nanoscribe, accepted the award yesterday at the ECOC 2024 exhibition in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The Quantum X align enables printing of low-loss optical couplers that are automatically aligned to fiducials on various types of photonic chips or optical fibers.
Jan Szabados, Product Manager at Nanoscribe, receives the ECOC Industry Award in the category "Most Innovative Product / Most Innovative Chip-Scale Packaging" for Quantum X align, a microfabrication system dedicated to photonics manufacturing and packaging. Image Credit: © Nanoscribe
"This is a huge recognition of the transformative potential of the Quantum X align," Dr. Jan Szabados, Product Manager at Nanoscribe, stated upon receiving the award. "More than anything, this award is a testament to our team's dedication to build a product that truly addresses one of the main challenges of today’s photonic integration landscape: low-loss, high-reliability optical coupling between different optical components," Jan added.
Aligned 3D Printing in Integrated Photonics Manufacturing
The large number of different substrates and interfaces used in the photonic integration market calls for versatile low-loss optical couplers that can connect different material platforms with their specific optical characteristics such as mode fields. Quantum X align addresses these market needs by enabling 3D printing of freeform microoptical elements aligned to fiducials, such as waveguides, markers on photonic chips, or chip edges. The accuracy of the lateral alignment reaches down to 100 nm, and the suitable material platforms are almost unlimited, allowing printing on silicon, silicon phosphide, silicon nitride, silicon on insulator, indium phosphide, lithium niobate, glass, and more. This advances photonics packaging by providing aligned 3D printing of optical interconnects without the need for further assembly, active alignment or fixation steps.
Outstanding Results at Highest Throughput
For photonics applications, it is crucial to have microoptical elements with the best possible shape accuracy, optical surface quality, and accurate placement and alignment to the structures to be interconnected. With Nanoscribe's proprietary Aligned 2-Photon Lithography (A2PL®) technology, all types of freeform microoptics can be printed directly onto optical fiber tips, photonic chip edges, chip surfaces or wafers, always spatially aligned to fiducials and 3D topographies. This results in robust optical interconnects with minimal optical attenuation, even in cryogenic environments.
However, industrial scale manufacturing is not only about quality, but also about throughput. To achieve this, Nanoscribe has extended its industry-proven Two-Photon Grayscale Lithography (2GL®) technology to the third dimension. The so-called 3D printing by 2GL®, is based on dynamic voxel tuning that requires significantly fewer printing layers to achieve outstanding printing results in the shortest possible time. Throughput is increased by up to 60 times while maintaining the highest level of shape accuracy and optical surface quality.
ECOC Exhibition
Over the course of 18 years, the European Exhibition on Optical Communication (ECOC) has developed to the key meeting place for over 6,000 decision makers from the optic communication technology industry. As Europe’s largest exhibition dedicated to fiber optics and integrated photonics, it brings together top players from academia and industry to discuss the latest developments on the market. The ECOC Exhibition Industry Awards have been launched in 2020 and highlights significant achievements in advancing the business of optical communications, transport, networking, fiber-based products, photonic integrated circuits and related developments.
Discover the Power of Aligned 3D printing
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