GalayOr Inc. announces a brand new approach to All-Silicon Integrated Optical Components.

GalayOr Inc. launches innovative All-Silicon Moving Waveguide technology, which is based on standard Silicon processing and packaging.

Atlanta, GA - March 26th 2003 - GalayOr (Light Waves" in Hebrew), a provider of low cost, mass producible and dynamically configurable All-Silicon Integrated Optical Components, has announced today its Moving Silicon Waveguide technology launch.

In the recent years, the communications industry had been facing a strong down turn. This, more than ever, had forced the system vendors to become more efficient and to develop more cost effective solutions. Since optics represents a significant portion of the systems, the majority of the effort has to be done on that front.

In order to do so, the optical component industry needs to be able to offer:
- Interconnectivity of optical components, in order to avoid the existing labor intensive and costly fiber splicing and alignment process.
- Chip scale integration of optical components, which enables low cost and high reproducibility is key for next generation optical communication systems.
- Standard Process and Packaging of optical components, which is inherent for mass production and repeatability.

With this in mind, GalayOr developed a unique Moving Silicon Waveguide technology that takes advantage of the standard and well-established silicon process and packaging in order to manufacture optical components.

"Our Silicon PhotonICs Components are a landmark in the photonic industry" said Dr. Uri Geiger, GalayOrs CEO, " Since 1966, when it was discovered that information can be transported over light through an Silica fiber, most optical components where built using silica to guide light .

It was conventional wisdom that silicon is not an efficient medium to guide light and the very few attempts to use silicon resulted in high insertion loss. In the last few months we were able to brake some of the industrys barriers, transferring light from silica fiber to a silicon waveguide in a manner which is comparable to silica industry standards. This, coupled with our innovative Moving Silicon Waveguides technology enables us to provide mass-producible, highly integrated and low cost All-Silicon Subsystems-on-a-Chip by using IC worlds standard processes and packaging".

Said Dr. Alka Swanson, former JDS Uniphase VP, GM at West Trenton NJ, and a member of GalayOrs Advisory Board: GalayOrs approach to our industrys challenges is unique. The simplicity of All-Silicon components can tie together the electronic and the optical industries. In the short term, we are able to see the first integrated opto-electrical components, where in the future, the ability of the waveguides to adaptively align themselves to the fiber can become a corner stone of a new world of optical motherboards ".

About GalayOr's Silicon PhotonICs Technology:
The core technology consists of Moving Silicon Waveguides. In order to perform functions such as attenuation, switching, filtering or alignment, these Waveguides can be shifted in and out the silicon plane by MEMS (Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems). GalayOr has broken the traditional coupling barrier of Silicon PLC to fibers, achieving coupling efficiency which is better than 90% ( 0.3dB coupling loss ).

GalayOrs Silicon PhotonICs technology transform optical components into the well established, mass producible VLSI universe. This technology allows the company to offer a wide range of product lines, which save up to 95% in cost and size.

Among the product suits announced today:

- Variable Optical Attenuators

About GalayOr
GalayOr is a privately held company, founded in late 2000 following four-years of research at Tel Aviv University. GalayOr is headquartered in the US, with an R&D facility in Israel. The company delivers low cost mass producible and dynamically configurable All-Silicon Integrated Components for optical communications vendors and optical interconnects. To learn more on GalayOr visit us at www.galayor.com