Many of the arguments surrounding the materials for modulators and methods of integration with lasers are relevant to many of the functions needed for optical networks, not just modulators. The monolithic versus hybrid debate and the quest to reduce package size may seem to favor compound semiconductors. The key issue is not that scientists are working at this scale, it is that they are performing manipulations at the atomic level to create novel materials structures.
Polymer technology is emerging as a significant technology. But, in the context of polymers, there are vast differences. A polymer is not a polymer; a polymer at the nanotechnology level is a collection of carbon and other molecules connected in a particular manner. The ability to make sophisticated polymers with the desired characteristics is basic to the chemistry applied to the optical modulator technology problem.
Any chemist can make a basic polymer. The ability to make a polymer that works for telecommunications in a network as an optical modulator is a far more difficult task. Not every chemist can make the polymer desired. There is a range of options in constructing the polymer and only the nanotechnology experts can generate a polymer with the desired characteristics. There are vast differences in quality even in the select group able to make polymer optical modulators.
The situation is similar to making bread. Everyone can mix flour and yeast. The mixing is easy, you get the ingredients and put them together, but some bread is better than other bread, some is really good, and some is not even eatable. A blob of dough the right length cooked at the right temperature produces bread that rises at the end of cooking instead of producing a limp lump of flour blob. Polymer chemistry is the same.
A polymer is just a collection of carbon molecules and some dyes. The same idea of acorrect mixture at a correct temperature goes for polym ers. It is the recipe and the temperature and the choice of other molecules that are combined with the carbon that makes a functional optical modulator. How carbon is attached and how other molecules are attached to the carbon determine what happens inside the optical modulator.
The important thing is the side groups or the functionality created by the chemistry of the polymer. Not all polymers are the same. Chemically different functionality groups are created to make the optical modulator. How those functionality groups are distributed along the carbon determines what is attached where.
A polymer is just a length of carbon molecules connected together, instead of being a chain they are one unit. The definition of the polymer is further controlled with dyes. These dyes are added in different concentrations and at different temperatures to make proprietary substances that are more of less useful.
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