Michael Lebby
CEO
Lightwave Logic Inc
Presently, Michael is driving new frontiers in the integrated photonics field as: CEO and Board Director, Lightwave Logic Inc. Michael is also part-time full Professor and Chair of optoelectronics at Glyndwr University in Wales, UK where he contributes to the European Commission’s programs and pilot lines in integrated photonics. Michael has been involved in photonics for his whole career which began with research for the UK Government R&D labs in 1977, and continued at AT&T Bell Labs in 1984. At that time, Michael’s activities included researching novel optoelectronic devices in III-V compound semiconductors. Michael then went to Motorola’s Corporate R&D labs in 1989 and drove the VCSEL based technology platform to product and high volume manufacturing. He continued his fiber optics roles at AMP/TE Connectivity, and then helped initiate Intel’s silicon photonics work in 1999. In 2001, he founded his own company Ignis Optics to develop OC-48/192 transceivers and subsequently sold the company to Bookham (now Oclaro). Michael then led OIDA (Optoelectronics Industry Development Association) in Washington DC to campaign on behalf of the photonics industry. At OIDA Michael coined the term ‘green photonics’ and established this as discipline in the industry. Michael also spoke on Capitol Hill representing the optoelectronics industry. Since 2010, Michael has been focusing on bringing PIC (Photonic Integrated Circuit) based technologies to market in various roles that include Solar, LED lighting, and Integrated Photonics for fiber communications. Michael is pursuing high speed polymer based integrated photonics as part of a polymer PIC platform at Lightwave Logic Inc.
Presentations
Positioning electro-optic polymer modulators as an optical engine to extend data rate and low power performance for optical networking
Electro-optic polymer modulators are now being seriously considered by industry as it looks to increase modulation speed and lowering power consumption. Polymer modulators have inherent speed and low power characteristics, as well as the ability to be additive to any semiconductor wafer platform including Silicon photonics and Indium Phosphide (InP) using foundries. Furthermore, polymer modulators are small enough to fit easily into pluggable transceiver modules and have the potential to enable the future multi-Tbps aggregated data-rates that the industry anticipates over the next decade. The talk will discuss the latest results on foundry fabricated EO polymers for integrated photonics platforms with reliability data. This talk will also review the latest work in photonics roadmaps on both the integrated photonics (PIC) level as well as PIC packaging level.