News in brief: Semiconductor sales, GE Quartz
According to the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), worldwide sales grew 18.3 percent to $166.4 billion in 203, compared with $$140.8 billion in 2002. A further increase of 19 precent is expected in 2004.
Growth was spearheaded by the wireless market segment, which grew by 16% during the year. Even the wireline communications market turned in a positive performance in the final quarter of 2003, for the first time since 2000.
GE’s Advanced Ceramics facility receives ISO 9001:2000 certification
GE Advanced Materials – Quartz has announced that the quality management system at the Advanced Ceramics facility in Strongsville, OH has been recently certified to the ISO 9001:2000 standard, an upgrade from its previous ISO9002 certification.
Since the purchase of Advanced Ceramics Corporation in November 2002, GE has moved rapidly to implement a Six Sigma approach to further improve product and process quality. This highly disciplined quality system provides a rigorous process for identifying and eliminating variances in a wide range of manufacturing and business processes, helping to enable the delivery of world class products and services.
Growth predicted for modulator market
According to Electronicast, global consumption of optical modulators will increase at a strong pace of 38 percent per year over the next five years, from $266 million in 2002 to over $1.3 billion in 2007, with rapidly rising quantity growth offset by falling average prices.
In 2002, electro-optical (E-O) optical modulators, typically utilizing lithium niobate as a base held 60 percent market share of global consumption. The electroabsorption (E/A) market share will increase in relative market share over 45 percent by 2012.
The integration of laser diodes, photo diodes, transmitter/receiver (T/R) pairs, passive optical components and other optical components has started with the simplest level of hybrid integration in the lower data rate components (155 and 622 Mbit/s). This will expand steadily into more complex hybrid integration, and into data rate components.
Manufacturers have started development of integration of laser diodes with modulators and optical waveguides fabricated on a single die. Both E-O and E/A modulators are undergoing R & D processes. The main dynamic for the integration of modulators with other components is economics; i.e. does the packaged deliver a less costly solution. Of course, there are also application drivers, such as smaller packages, lower loss and better temperature control of the single package.
