Patent Reading Guide
These records identify useful technical disclosures, their named inventors, and their publication history. They complement the papers in Reviews and Original Research; a later patent on a particular implementation is not evidence that its inventors originated the entire technology.
Dates below distinguish the earliest priority reported in the record from publication of the listed document. Original assignees are reported where stated. The linked records provide specifications, figures, claims, family members, and citations; these are starting points for technical reading, rather than conclusions about present patent rights.
P1. Fused multimode access coupler
US4291940A — Low loss access coupler for multimode optical fiber distribution systems.
Inventors: Brian S. Kawasaki, Kenneth O. Hill, and Derwyn C. Johnson.
Original assignee: Canadian Patents and Development Ltd.
Priority / filing: 13 June 1977. Published / granted: 29 September 1981.
Read for: fused biconical taper geometry, twisting and heating methods, and multimode access-coupler fabrication. This gives a detailed technical route into the early FBT literature.
P2. Multiport star distribution
US4330170A — Low-loss star couplers for optical fiber systems.
Inventors: Derwyn C. Johnson, Brian S. Kawasaki, and Kenneth O. Hill.
Original assignee: Canadian Patents and Development Ltd.
Priority / filing: 26 November 1979. Published / granted: 18 May 1982.
Read for: reflection and hybrid transmission/reflection stars made from fused, tapered fiber loops. This is a multiport distribution architecture, rather than a promise of efficient independent-source combining into one SM output.
P3. Wavelength-flattened fused splitting
US4798436A — Optical fused couplers.
Inventor: David B. Mortimore.
Original assignee: British Telecommunications PLC.
Priority: 30 July 1985. US filing shown: 25 July 1986. Published / granted: 17 January 1989.
Read for: deliberately different propagation constants in the coupling region to obtain selected split ratios over a wider wavelength range. This addresses broadband power splitting, not merely combining distinct wavelength channels.
P4. Integrated splitter packaging and testing
EP0907092A1 — Method of manufacturing and testing integrated optical components.
Inventors: Patrick Jean Pierre Herve and Thierry Luc Alain Dannoux.
Original assignee: Corning Inc.
Priority and filing date reported: 25 November 1991. This application publication: 7 April 1999.
Read for: aligning and attaching multiple fiber pigtails before separating wafer-level devices, and arranging the pigtails for testing. Splitter/combiner structures appear in the disclosure. Its relevance is manufacturability and packaging, not an assertion that this is the original PLC splitting principle.
P5. Tapered bundles for cladding-pumped devices
US5864644A — Tapered fiber bundles for coupling light into and out of cladding-pumped fiber devices.
Inventors: David John DiGiovanni and Andrew John Stentz.
Original assignee: Lucent Technologies Inc.
Priority / filing: 21 July 1997. Published / granted: 26 January 1999.
Read for: bundling and tapering MM input fibers, fusion-splicing the bundle to a cladding-pumped fiber, and optionally including an SM core for a signal path. Figures 1 and 3 are particularly useful for understanding pump-only versus pump/signal combining.
P6. Integrated coherent fiber combining
US8184363B2 — All-fiber integrated high power coherent beam combination.
Inventor: Joshua Elliott Rothenberg.
Original assignee listed: Northrop Grumman Systems Corp.
Priority / filing: 7 August 2009. Application publication: US20110032602A1, 10 February 2011. Listed grant publication: 22 May 2012.
Read for: phase and polarization control with a tapered-fiber combining architecture. This is a useful disclosure for comparing coherent field combination with an ordinary incoherent power bundle.
P7. Later photonic-lantern implementations
US20200083659A1 — Photonic Lantern Structures and Devices.
Inventors: Peter Reeves-Hall, Juan C. Montoya, and Dale H. Martz.
Priority: 7 September 2018. Filed: 5 September 2019. Application publication: 12 March 2020. Related US grant: US11588292B2, published 21 February 2023.
Read for: lantern structures for several input cores, phase-dependent output routing, and arrangements involving active fibers. This is a later implementation disclosure; the early lantern experiment in this survey is O6. Early photonic-lantern demonstration, 2005 from 2005.
Application specification and figures and original application PDF.
How to follow the literature trail
Read the figures and description to understand the optical paths, then compare the claims with that description. Follow cited papers backward for earlier demonstrations and forward citations for later implementations. Keep one entry per technical disclosure or family in research notes: application and grant publications are different versions, not independent experiments. A claimed priority date is also not necessarily a date when the disclosure became public.