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March 23, 2004 — Industry watchers predict 2004 will see progress in getting “fiber to the home” — telecom’s long-sought solution to the problem of directly delivering high-quality and high-speed video, voice and data. But the rollout still moves at a glacial pace because of the high costs of deploying fiber-optic networks to individual homes and businesses.
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Two Danish firms hope to offer some price-busting help in a small package.
NKT Integration AS in February announced it is integrating MEMS-based packaging technology from Hymite AS into a planar light circuit that encapsulates the optical devices necessary for sending and receiving data and video signals. Such a system potentially could be cheaper because it can be assembled automatically — as opposed to the current manual approach — and micromachining the protective caps makes them smaller and lets developers pack more parts within them.
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“That’s why optical equipment is so expensive; there’s a lot of manual labor in packaging optical devices,” said Jorgen Hoeg, Hymite’s business development director. “The hurdle has been the cost of … the installation of fiber and the optical transceiver that sits in the home. With this approach, we help reduce the cost of that device because it’s built automatically and it’s smaller. And smaller means less expensive.”
Hoeg said the deal is a “design win,” meaning NKT engineers are working with Hymite’s technology but the firms have yet to sign a contract. Still, he said, such a purchase order is likely, and he expects that a system incorporating the technology could be ready for the market by the end of the year.
That dovetails with developments on the fiber-to-the-home front. The three largest telecom providers — Verizon, SBC and BellSouth — agreed last year on a set of standards for residential fiber-optic networks. Still, cost estimates of rolling out such networks range from more than $1,000 to nearly $3,000 per home.
New packaging techniques also could benefit the MEMS industry, which places the price of packaging at anywhere from 60 percent to 85 percent of the cost of developing a device. The challenge comes in integrating parts into a package that protects them from the environment, but the package must also allow for those parts to interact with the environment.
Hoeg said Hymite’s packages, which are micromachined out of silicon, serve as a cap over the device as it sits in a cavity on a silicon substrate. The electrical connections are on the silicon and signals come out through its backside, which allows for a surface-mountable package. The approach creates packages that are hermetic, meaning they are free of leaks, and thermally compatible with silicon. When a package made of ceramic gets hot, the ceramic and the device expand at different rates and create tensions.
Hymite also announced in February that it jointly developed an optical leak detector with Germany’s NanoFocus AG for the hermetic testing of thousands of devices at a time on a wafer. Simultaneous tests are common in the electrical industry, but most optical testing today is done one device at a time, Hoeg said, and it can be both expensive and inaccurate.
Once the caps have been sealed in place, Hymite changes the pressure surrounding the package, so the walls bend inward, or deflect. Then, using optical techniques and equipment developed by NanoFocus, the company measures the deflection to determine the presence and size of leaks.
The leak detection system is used at Hymite’s production facility in Berlin, but Hoeg said the company intends to sell it to customers using the company’s packaging techniques.
Although the company focuses on developing and selling packages for encapsulating optical components, Hoeg said its first volume application is with an undisclosed maker of a disposable MEMS device for medicine. Hymite expects details to be released when the device completes a certification process this spring.
Marlene Bourne, a MEMS analyst for In-Stat/MDR, said using micromachining approaches to make packages for optical and MEMS devices is appealing because of the size and accuracy it brings. But she sees bigger things for Hymite’s packaging techniques.
“There are other areas that can take advantage of a small form factor,” she said. “At the end of the day, this solution is probably going to be more attractive to and more beneficial to … the general semiconductor industry.”