Southampton Photonics's £6 million speciality fibre manufacturing facility begins operations, providing in-house control of fibre manufacture for use in its own products
In-fibre optical components and subsystems vendor Southampton Photonics (SPI) has opened its speciality optical fibre manufacturing facility at Hedge End, near Southampton, UK.
The plant, which represents an investment of approximately $6 million, occupies part of the company's new 2800 square metre premises and will primarily provide speciality fibre for use in its own products.
Speciality fibre is a term encompassing those fibre products used for specialist applications as opposed to the high volume transmission fibre used throughout the communications networks.
Speciality fibre comes in many forms, each with its own particular specification and application.
For example, the core of the fibre can be doped with rare-earth elements such as erbium or ytterbium for use in active fibre products such as fibre amplifiers and distributed feedback fibre lasers, or it may have a specific refractive index for use in passive photonics components.
Don Spalinger, SPI's senior vice president, commented, "It is inherent in our application specific fibre platform that all of our components are based on speciality fibre, and having control of its manufacture is critical to the success of our business. Consequently, we are delighted to have the most up to date drawing facilities in the industry.
Furthermore, the team which brought this project to fruition, led by Steve Norman who joined us from Pirelli last year, is one the most experienced in the world." Until now, SPI has made use of the fibre drawing facility at the University of Southampton's Optoelectronic Research Centre, although an in-house capability has always formed part of the company's business plan.
The Hedge End facility includes a purpose-built suite of clean rooms for fibre manufacture that are serviced with high-purity process gases and chemicals, and by ambient temperature and humidity control and environmental management systems.
The state-of-the-art fibre-manufacturing equipments include a dual-line, 11.5m drawing tower, MCVD (modified chemical vapour deposition) equipment for the manufacture of speciality fibre preforms, and other associated specialist equipment such as a preform profiler that measures the refractive index of the preform glass rod and its core prior to drawing.
Quality assurance measurement systems are installed to enable full optical, mechanical and environmental performance tests on finished fibres.
The use of speciality fibre is growing rapidly and a recent forecast from ElectroniCast suggests that its worldwide use will grow from $239 million in 2000 to $4.38 billion by 2010.
