PATENT CLAIM ANALYSIS

Application Number: 15973266
Application Type: Utility
Filing Date: 2018-05
Publication Date: 2019-11
Patent Classification: ["385", "014000"]

Abstract:
Consistent with the present disclosure, one or more spare Widely Tunable Lasers (WTLs) are integrated on a PIC. In the event that a channel, including, for example, a laser, a modulator and a semiconductor optical amplifier in a transmitter or Tx PIC, or a laser, optical hybrid, and photodiodes, for example, in a receiver PIC (Rx PIC), includes one or more defective devices, a spare channel is selected that includes a widely tunable laser (WTL) which may be tuned to the wavelength associated with any of the channels on the PIC. Accordingly, the spare channel replaces the defective channel or the lowest performing channel and outputs modulated optical signals at the wavelength associated with the defective channel. Thus, even though a defective channel may be present, a die consistent with the present disclosure may still output or receive the desired channels because the spare channel replaces the defective channel. As a result, yields and minimum performance may improve compared to PICs that do not have a spare channel and manufacturing costs may be reduced. Alternatively, connections, such as fiber connections, may be made only to the operation or best performing channels.

Claim (Index 11):
An apparatus, comprising:\n a photonic integrated circuit (PIC), which includes N lasers and k spare lasers, each of the N lasers and each of the k spare lasers being widely tunable, the PIC includes corresponding N channels and k spare channels, N and k being integers; and a planar lightwave circuit having N outputs, a plurality of switches being provided in the PLC and optically coupled each of the N channels and each of the k spare channels, such that one of the plurality of switches directs modulated optical signals from one of the k spare channels to one of the N outputs, and one of the N channels is deactivated wherein said one of the N channels does not receive or supply light that has been modulated to carry data.

Metadata:
- Claim Count in Document: 1.0
- Percentile: 93.0
- Lexical Diversity: 2.19802
- Patent Class: 385.0
- Transitional Phrase Type: open
- Component Type: 1
- Foreign Priority: False
- Related Applications: ['15392813', '12612646', '10317935', '10267331', '11773938']

Analysis Scores:
- 35 USC 101 Eligibility (BERT): 0.812184752225734
- 35 USC 102 Novelty (BERT): 0.4805157298470056
- Combined Prediction Score: 0.7790178499878612
- Mean Citation Score: 196.47227200000003
- Max Citation Score: 214.24646
- Similarity Product: 164.96803338212968

Labels:
- Claim Label 101: 1
- Claim Label 102: 1
- Claim Label 103: 1
- Claim Label 112: 1
- Combined Label: 1
- Label 101 Adjusted: 1

Dataset: test