Oki Electric Develops World's Smallest Low-cost uBOSA chips for Fiber-to-the-Home Modules Using Silicon Lens -- Enables Lower Cost with Half the Parts Count and Automatic Assembling.

TOKYO -- Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd. (TSE:6703) today announced it has succeeded in developing the world's smallest low-cost uBOSA chip (Micro Bidirectional Optical SubAssembly Chip) for use in fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) modules. With Oki's silicon lens(1), a bi-directional optical communication function is achieved in chip just 2mm square. This chip is used in the uBOSA module, which is a compact, low-cost, two-way optical subassembly for FTTH, developed jointly by Oki Electric and Sigma-Links Inc.

"We are proud to present the world's smallest uBOSA chip, which is a product of Oki's technological advances in silicon LSI fabrication. Oki's silicon lens is the key part in achieving compact uBOSA chips, which are promising candidates for use as low-cost FTTH components," said Takaki Yamada, President of Silicon Manufacturing Company at Oki Electric. "We believe these lenses will contribute to the optical communication network market including for metro, access and data communications which require smaller, higher function, and lower cost optical components."

Conventional FTTH optical components are combined with a packaged laser diode (LD) chip, a packaged photodetector (PD) chip, an optical filter(2), and glass lenses, all in a metal housing. Then optical path between these optical parts is aligned individually by optimizing optical powers and fixed by laser welding. However, this conventional method takes 40 some optical parts including those inside the packages and involves a complicated packaging process, which made it difficult to reduce costs.

The newly developed uBOSA chip includes a non-packaged bare LD and PD chips, an optical filter, and Oki's silicon lenses, which are assembled on a silicon optical bench(3) with a V-shaped high-precision groove. The chip integrates the components using surface mounting technology(4) utilizing image recognition. Silicon microlenses and silicon optical benches are precisely fabricated based on silicon micro fabrication technology. Oki assembles the silicon lens on the V-groove in the silicon optical bench for automatic optical alignment. This enables Oki to reduce the number of parts down to 15, thus reducing the assembly hours, and significantly reducing optical component costs.

Oki will present a research paper regarding uBOSA chip and uBOSA technology at the 2006 Optical Fiber Communication Conference & Exposition (OFC:06) (http://www.ofcnfoec.org/) to be held at the Anaheim Convention Center in Los Angeles from March 5th to March 10th. Oki will exhibit and explain its silicon lens and uBOSA chip at its booth #3447.

Oki Electric will provide samples of its silicon lens from April 2006. Using its super small multi function optical integrated chip technology, Oki plans to deploy an optical platform business wherein various optical components can be handled in the same effective manner.

Glossary

(1) Silicon lens:

A micro lens for optical communication that can be processed in volume with LSI manufacturing technology. Developed by Oki Electric in 2002.

(2) Optical filter:

A filter that passes certain wavelength optical signal waves and reflects other wavelengths. It is a key component used to multiplex and demultiplex optical signals in WDM (wavelength division multiplexing) in which multiple optical signal waves are transmitted in a single optical fiber.

(3) Silicon optical bench:

A silicon platform with a V-shaped high-precision groove fabricated by using silicon micro processing technology. Various optical devices such as optical fibers and LD chips can be arranged and mounted on the board.

(4) Surface mounting technology:

A technology to achieve low-cost volume production chips by positioning an optical fiber in the V-shaped groove and LD chips on the flat surface, enabling automatic optical alignment. By also placing Oki's silicon lens in the V-shape groove, Oki achieved optical alignment between the lens and other optical elements, which had been impossible before.

About Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd.

Founded in 1881, Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd. is Japan's first telecommunications manufacturer, with its headquarters in Tokyo, Japan. With the corporate vision, "Oki, Network Solutions for a Global Society," Oki provides top-quality products, technologies and solutions to its customers through its info-telecom system business, semiconductor business and printer business. All three businesses function as a collective force to create exciting new products and technologies that satisfy a spectrum of customer needs in various markets. Visit Oki's global web site at http://www.oki.com/.

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