PATENT CLAIM ANALYSIS

Application Number: 15973274
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 15):
An apparatus, comprising:\n a photonic integrated circuit (PIC), which includes N 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 free space optics be optically coupled to the PIC, the free space optics including a plurality of lenses, such that one of the plurality of lenses directs modulated optical signals from one of the k spare channels to one of the N inputs of the PIC, 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: 45.0
- Percentile: 93.0
- Lexical Diversity: 2.19802
- Patent Class: 385.0
- Transitional Phrase Type: open
- Component Type: 1
- Foreign Priority: False
- Related Applications: ['15392813', '10317935', '12612646', '10267331', '12466935']

Analysis Scores:
- 35 USC 101 Eligibility (BERT): 0.780870105763487
- 35 USC 102 Novelty (BERT): 0.4925609375418938
- Combined Prediction Score: 0.7520391889413277
- Mean Citation Score: 198.005872
- Max Citation Score: 220.71915
- Similarity Product: 164.5848371527523

Labels:
- Claim Label 101: 1
- Claim Label 102: 1
- Claim Label 103: 1
- Claim Label 112: 0
- Combined Label: 1
- Label 101 Adjusted: 1

Dataset: test