PHOTLINE Technologies

NEWS & PRESS
Photline becomes Centellax Distributor in France:

Besancon, France, Nov 08. In addition to its own range of solutions for optical modulation Photline Technologies now offers the Centellax products to customers of the french market : - Test Solutions for 10 Gb/s, 40 Gb/s, 56 Gb/s : PRBS, BERT, CLK Synthetizers, CLK prescalers - Amplifiers and Modulator Drivers Modules up to 56 Gb/s - Muxes and DeMuxes Centellax products are based on proprietary IC's and differentiate by high performance and low cost. Centellax test equipments have a simplified architecture, that allows to produce them at lower cost than traditional test equipments. Centellax products are intended for microwave and high data rate digital applications, they fit very well with Photline Technologies products and with the french company expertise.


Valencia, Spain. On February 21st 2008, a consortium leads by the The Valencia Nanophotonics Technology Center (NTC) of the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain), and formed with the catholic University of Leuven (Belgium), the faculty of engineering of the Lisbon Technical University (Portugal), the University of Rennes 1 (France), and the companies Wisair (Israel), Agilent Technologies Belgium, Photline Technologies (France), DAS Photonics (Spain), IMST (Germany), Siradel (France) and Euskaltel (Spain), jointly announced the grant of 2,675 M€ of funding by the European Commission under its Seventh Framework Program for Research and Technological Development. The purpose of UCELLS project is to demonstrate the Cellular UWB capabilities employing a spectrum monitoring system based on a high performance ADC in order to efficiently enable coexistence and compatibility of UWB-based wireless communications with existing and future mobile and fixed wireless systems. In that frame Photline is involved in the design and realization of the time-stretched photonic ADC, for 3 – 10GHz signals. Photline will provide a linearized lithium niobate modulator as a key part of the Photonic ADC. Further details may be found at: http://ist-ucells.org/.










Photline merges with RF- specialist AdLightec
	Besancon, France, June 02, 2008:
	Photline Technologies, a supplier of optical modulation solutions, is pleased to announce its merger with the french start-up AdLightec, a supplier of high speed electronic modules. The new company will benefit from an enlarged technology platform and will operate under Photline Technologies name.
AdLightec state-of-the-art high speed digital and microwave electronic circuits and modules combined with Photline Technologies lithium niobate modulators will provide the industry with high performance optical modulation solutions. This merger gives Photline Technologies a key position in the market place as it now owns a technology platform capable of designing and manufacturing both the optical and the electronic parts of high bandwidth and high data rate optical modulation solutions. The combination of the complementary technologies will enable to design more powerful and better integrated optical modulation solutions with improved performance and optimized power consumption and size. Such solutions are required by the telecom industry and in the defense, instruments and sensing markets. CEO of the company Henri Porte highlights the benefits of integrating the optical and electronics technologies : « this merger positions Photline Technologies in an unparalleled situation to better serve existing customers of both companies and to expand its customer base by offering more complete solutions that meet market’s expectations. It will allow the company to accelerate the regular growth it has experienced since its creation ».

Photline moves to new facilities Besançon, France - November 13, 2006:.
	Photline Technologies moves to new facilities in Besancon, France. 1000 m2 of modern space, including 550 m2 of clean space for fabrication and tests, 150m2 of clean rooms for chip making are the new environment of Photline. At the earth of the industrial area of Besancon, Photline concentrate all its task force in a complete in-house manufacturing capability, to serve better and faster customers. Management, R&D, Production Test & Qualifications, are now located together at: PHOTLINE Technologies 16 Rue Jouchoux, 25000 Besancon, France Phone: +33 (0) 381 85 31 80 / Fax: +33 (0) 381 811 557 GPS: E: 5°59'16" N: 47°14'20"

Researchers announce real-time electronic polarization tracking in optical polarization-multiplexed QPSK transmission MARCH 21, 2007 - summary paper (.pdf) The University of Paderborn in Germany, CeLight Israel, and Photline in France today announced what they claims is the first real-time electronic tracking of optical polarization changes in a polarization-multiplexed synchronous optical quadrature phase shift keying data transmission. This milestone was achieved in the synQPSK Consortium, funded by the European Commission. The synQPSK modulation scheme quadruples optical fiber capacity and allows for a purely electronic equalization of chromatic and polarization mode dispersions in optical fiber. In the University of Paderborn, the signal from a standard distributed-feedback laser was impressed with 2.8-Gbit/sec data in two QPSK modulators from Photline to transport in-phase and quadrature data in two orthogonal polarizations at a line rate of only 0.7 Gbits/sec. After transmission over 80 km of fiber, the signals were received in a polarization diversity intradyne coherent optical receiver with two integrated-optical 90 ° hybrids from CeLight and another standard laser as a local oscillator. The detected four photocurrent signals were proportional to in-phase and quadrature components of the received optical field in two polarizations. After analog-to-digital conversion, the electronic field vector comprising two mixed polarizations was transformed into a polarization-separated one by a matrix multiplication in a field-programmable gate array, say the researchers. Finally, a phase-noise tolerant feed-forward scheme recovered the intermediate frequency carrier in spite of its 2-MHz linewidth, and the four digitized data signals were demodulated synchronously. Correlation of the four data streams before and behind the decision circuits was performed to dynamically update the sixteen matrix elements. Motorized fiber loops causing endless polarization changes at a speed of up to 50 rad/sec made the received signal highly time-variable. However, a polarization control time constant of 23.5 microseconds rendered this harmless and allowed successful data recovery, note the researchers. The achieved bit error ratio was within the threshold of state-of-the-art forward error correction schemes, they claim. While other researchers have reported only offline polarization acquisition, or real-time data transmission without polarization multiplex, this is the first time that all ingredients of an ultimate performance, bandwidth-efficient, robust optical modulation scheme have been combined, say the researchers. Those ingredients include real-time adaptive electronic polarization tracking and synchronous demodulation, transmission of four bit per symbol using QPSK, and polarization division multiplexed standard lasers. With suitable electronics for 40-Gbit/sec (10-Gbaud) operation on the horizon, including the possibility of a greater than tenfold polarization tracking speed increase, these properties make synQPSK a very attractive option for the cost-effective growth of optical transmission capacity, say the researchers.
A summary of the paper can be found here.

Photline unveils ModBox transmitter benchtop series Besançon, France - January 5, 2006. The Modbox design integrates within a 2U 19" enclosure a laser source (optional), a complete modulation stage featuring an external LiNb0₃ modulator with its RF driver and bias control circuit, and a receiver stage (optional).The ModBox design can be tailored to specific transmission needs in order to provide systems engineers with reliable performance and high speed modulation capabilities, which include : - Digital Modulation up to 43 Gb/s with either RZ, NRZ, PSBT, DPSK, QPSK - Analog Modulation up to 20 GHzOff-the-shelf, ready-to- use NRZ - RZ 10GB/s ModBox units are available for delivery....Full article

Photline touts ultra low loss intensity modulators Fibers.org, September 15th, 2005 Besancon, France, September 14, 2005. Photline Technologies, a supplier of Lithium Niobate (LiNbO3) based modulation solutions, announces the release of Ultra Low Loss optical modulators. Photline has achieved a record 3 dB insertion loss in its wide bandwidth X-cut Mach- Zehnder LiNbO3 modulators. While traditional manufacturing of modulators results in insertion loss higher than 4 dB, this reduction of more than 1 dB, or 25% in the transmission loss translates into a significant improvement to the system designers for whom no loss is good loss.... Full story

Photline Technologies selected in the FP6-IST European Community Research Program - SynQPSK Project PADERBORN, Germany - On 30th July 2004 A consortium formed by the Univ. Paderborn in Germany and the companies CeLight in Israel, Photline Technologies in Besançon, France, and Innovative Processing AG (IPAG) in Duisburg, Germany, jointly announced the grant of 1.7 M€ of funding by the European Commission under its Sixth Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development. The four partners have teamed up to develop "Key Components for Synchronous Optical Quadrature Phase Shift Keying Transmission".... Full story