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Challenges of Optoelectronic Assembly Subject of SMTA Boston Chapter Presentation
October 22, 2002 |Estimated reading time: 1 minute
Boxboro, Mass. -- Optoelectronics holds much promise for the electronics industry, but presents challenges along the way, according to Ronald C. Lasky, Ph.D., P.E. who spoke at the SMTA Boston Chapter meeting here last week.
Lasky is a Senior Technologist at the Indium Corporation of America, and has worked in electronic and optoelectronic packaging for such companies as IBM, Universal Instruments and Cookson Electronics. He also serves as an Editorial Advisory Board member to SMT Magazine for optoelectronics.
Lasky began his talk by pointing out that despite the downturn, electronics is holding at $1 trillion -- a bigger industry than even automotive. The biggest area of electronics is computers, followed by communications, consumer electronics, industrial and medical, military and automotive, he added.
Optoelectronics, the art of launching light into fiber, began with telephony. Multimode optoelectronics is a lower cost, lower performance technology, since the signal degrades along the fiber as it travels, Lasky explained. With single mode optoelectronics, a single optical mode goes through a fiber core 1/10th the diameter of a human hair, and the signal does not degrade significantly as it moves along the fiber, making it ideal for long distances. Its drawback is its expense, Lasky added.
The optical fiber the light travels along is fragile and needs to be protected in a cable, Lasky said. A cable consists of a core, cladding, a buffer coating, plastic jackets, strength fibers and a shell. Attendant hardware, such as thermoelectric coolers and optical isolators, are avoided when possible, but are needed for high-performance optoelectronics, he added.
As for printed circuit board assembly using optoelectronics, the process is 95 percent the same. However, hand mounting with wave or selective solder, is required due to the temperature-sensitive nature of opto components. But test is "overwhelming," Lasky explained. "It is more expensive and complex. There are also concerns for fiber handling and optical alignment. These concerns are not intuitive or easy to detect when violated, but still pale before the challenges of optoelectronics test."