Propriatary technology for manufacture of solid or hollow optical fiber from a soft glass melt in arbitrary lengths appropriate for telcom or laser fabrication applications. Contact Flow Pharma, Inc. 650 462 1440
2. Management Team Reid Rubsamen, President and CEO A.B. Computer Science, Berkeley M.S. Computer Science, Stanford M.D. Stanford Laboratory for Computer Science, MIT Doctoral candidate 1989 - 1991 Founded Aradigm (IPO 1996) Founded Flow Pharma 2002 Named inventor on 65 issued U.S. Patents
3. Flow Focusing Technology Liquid guided by “lens” of gas producing precision micro-jet Jet does not touch sides of the hole Immaculate Extrusion
4. Flow Focusing Technology Invisible “lens” of gas can be qualitatively demonstrated experimentally
5. Flow Focusing Technology Concentric needle configuration Allows production of clad fiber or encapsulated microspheres Cure early for fiber Cure late for spheres
6. Flow Focusing Technology Steady state jet characteristics described by a formula Dependencies are on liquid density, gas pressure drop and liquid flow rate Patented Physics
7. Molten Material ExtrusionFiber Production Traditional optical fiber fabrication process Pre-form is mounted in a tower and heated Fiber is drawn down
8. Molten Material ExtrusionFiber Production No pre-form required Core and cladding can be co-extruded No heat or strain introduced by viscous fiber draw-down Wide range of possible materials
9. Fiber Optic Light Transmission Traditional approach is via total internal reflectance (TIR) Process is lossy and not phase preserving Photonic bandgap (PBG) transmission allows potentially lossless, phase preserving light transmission PBG fiber can be used to transmit very high energy laser light Short lengths of PBG fiber have been produced but no process exists for kilometer length production
10. PBG fiber is very high performance with ultra low loss PBG fiber has specialty fiber roles e.g. can serve as a notch filter Blaze founder Russell described simple structures for PBG transmission
11. Potential Benefits of PBG Fiber Long Haul Fiber << 0.1db loss/kilometer Phase preserving Broad band Specialty Fiber Transmission of high power laser light Passive notch filter
12. Potential Demand Internet optical backbone capacity requirement In-place internet optical backbone capacity Bandwidth Emergence of video-on-demand Time Bandwidth Time
29. Hollow Core Fiber Cross Section Randomly selected hollow fiber cross section. There are still instabilities evident in this early draw. The ten micron diameter core has good circularity and concentricity, but the fiber body is 10% elliptical. Several hundred meters of comparable fiber were produced in this experiment.