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For
Immediate Release:
Press Contacts:
Cheryl Delgreco or Krys Monaco
Delgreco/Kaye Communications
617-723-4004 or 603-893-5360
AXSUN OPENS FIRST NANOFABRICATION
FACILITY FOR OPTICAL NETWORK COMPONENTS
New Process Uses Unique Capabilities of Lawrence Berkeley Synchrotron
for Commercial Manufacturing Livermore, Calif. and Billerica, Mass.
— March 19, 2001 — AXSUN Technologies, a developer and manufacturer
of photonic subsystems for optical equipment suppliers has announced
the opening of a 14,000 square foot office and manufacturing facility
in East Livermore, California. Serving as AXSUN's west coast headquarters,
as well as its primary LIGA fabrication hub, the new facility will
produce high precision LIGA (a German acronym meaning lithography
electro-plating and molding) alignment structures used in the manufacture
of the company's agile photogenic subsystems. AXSUN also intends
to use the facility to provide LIGA foundry services to external
customers.
According to AXSUN, LIGA technology overcomes a major obstacle
in manufacturing the components used in fiber-optic networks that
power the Internet. Because of the precision of optical alignment
that is required, this is a highly labor-intensive process with
a low production yield. Component suppliers have difficulty scaling
up capacity for their products to meet heavy market demand. By
utilizing LIGA micro-alignment structures in concert with advanced
alignment equipment and processes, AXSUN has automated this crucial
manufacturing step while maintaining the highest level of performance.
"Many systems and components in the optical industry are still
made by hand using tweezers and epoxy, and the industry cannot
keep
pace with demand for optical network components," said Dr.
Dale Flanders, president and CEO of AXSUN Technologies. "LIGA
is one of the key enabling technologies in our photonics packaging
platform, which allows us to produce products of the highest level
of performance in packages that are an order of magnitude smaller
than the industry is offering today."
LIGA is a unique technology that uses x-ray lithography instead
of conventional metal machining to create tiny metal structures
with sub micron precision. This bulk MEMS (micro-electrical mechanical
systems) process produces robust metal structures with dimensions
ranging from a few millimeters to tens of millimeters. Features
are highly precise and can be deep and narrow due to the highly
parallel, deeply penetrating synchrotron radiation used to expose
molds, and the inherent strength and ductility of the metals. The
technology was invented in Germany during the early 1980s.
AXSUN executed a licensing agreement last year for certain LIGA
process technology with the Sandia National Laboratory in Livermore,
California, and is continuing to work with Sandia as a research
and development partner.
A critical step in the LIGA fabrication process takes place at
the Advanced Light Source (ALS) Synchrotron at the Lawrence Berkeley
Labs, one of the four major DOE synchrotron facilities in the U.S.
AXSUN operates a beamline facility at the ALS, which uses high
energy x-rays to expose an acrylic mask bonded to a silicon wafer
that contains an imprint of the LIGA structures. When the x-ray
hit the mask, the acrylic is etched in a manner that creates precise
molds of the LIGA micro-alignment structures. The exposed acrylic
wafers are sent back to AXSUN's Livermore facility where they are
chemically developed, electroplated, lapped and polished, and released
from the substrate. This wafer scale process creates thousands
of alignment structures on a single wafer.
The AXSUN beamline at the Lawrence Berkeley Synchrotron is one
of the first beamlines dedicated to manufacturing at a DOE synchrotron.
Back
© AXSUN Technologies |
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About AXSUN Technologies
AXSUN Technologies, established in 1999, has developed a revolutionary photonic
packaging platform capable of integrating nearly any combination of optical
devices. The company applies this platform to the manufacture of a new class
of photonic subsystems including the industry's smallest, high performance
optical performance monitors. The company's agile optical products are central
to the transformation of the Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) infrastructure
from an inflexible, constrained network to one that is agile and programmable
at the optical layer. More information about AXSUN is available at www.axsun.com. |
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