Companies from Asia are now competing to reach the next fiber optic breakthrough, as they pour increasingly higher resources into R&D. Just recently, students and professors from South China University have developed a new UV-resistant glass material, while Japan’s Socionext Inc. and Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. found success in creating a 56GB/s per channel transceiver that consumes a low amount of power unmatched by any other transceiver in existence.

1. Developments in the Asia-
Pacific Fiber Optic Research
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2. Companies from Asia are now competing to reach the next fiber optic breakthrough, as they
pour increasingly higher resources into R&D. Just recently, students and professors from
South China University have developed a new UV-resistant glass material, while Japan’s
Socionext Inc. and Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. found success in creating a 56GB/s per channel
transceiver that consumes a low amount of power unmatched by any other transceiver in
existence.
Keeping Up
Joel Bagwell, director of engineering and manufacturing technology at Edmund Optics in
Barrington, N.J., says it was only matter of time before Asian companies took notice of the
reliance on high-speed Internet in the US. “We have all seen this coming for some time.
Simply put, there will be greater demand for higher precision optics and our manufacturing
base must be prepared,” he says.
Bagwell stressed that US companies need to find ways to mass-produce higher precision
optics, better surfaces and the associated metrology. “The activity and considerable
management focus has revealed a different product profile, and overall a different recipe is
required to reach customers [other] than in the U.S,” he explains.

3. Catching On
On the subject of whether the East is catching up to the West in terms of fiber optic
developments, Bagwell says it is too early to determine. But, with innovations such as a new
fiber optic sensor that could allow noninvasive monitoring of early stage embryos during the
in vitro fertilization (IVF) process, as well as a new technique for fine-tuning the
performance of europium-doped gallium nitride devices, Bagwell agrees that Asian R&D
departments are not too far behind.
“Often, R&D activity is closely followed by production activity, and we are certainly seeing
the uptick in the Asia-Pacific region that puts it on par or even above that of the Western
hemisphere. So the developments mentioned are indicative of what we are seeing, in that
the ecosystem of R&D to production is becoming more self-contained within the Asian
countries,” Bagwell says.
Engineers from Asian countries such as China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and Singapore are
leading the charge in the global fiber optic internet arms race. Advances in the region are
placing these countries as powerful economic forces in a world that will rely heavily on high-
speed internet in as soon as a few years.

4. RESOURCES:
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http://www.photonics.com/Article.aspx?AID=58377