ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 4 -- United States Patent no. 12,321,022, issued on June 3, was assigned to Ayar Labs Inc. (San Jose, Calif.).

"Apparatus for optical fiber-to-photonic chip connection and associated methods" was invented by Mark Wade (Berkeley, Calif.), Chen Sun (Berkeley, Calif.), John Fini (Berkeley, Calif.), Roy Edward Meade (Boise, Idaho), Vladimir Stojanovic (Berkeley, Calif.) and Alexandra Wright (San Francisco).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A photonic chip includes a substrate, an electrical isolation region formed over the substrate, and a front end of line (FEOL) region formed over the electrical isolation region. The photonic chip also includes an optical coupling region. The ...