ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 16 -- United States Patent no. 12,306,439, issued on May 20, was assigned to Shanghai University (China).

"Optical waveguide multi-cascaded coupling mode division multiplexer" was invented by Tingyun Wang (Shanghai), Chuanlu Deng (Shanghai), Yi Huang (Shanghai) and Xiaobei Zhang (Shanghai).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Disclosed is an optical waveguide multi-cascaded coupling mode division multiplexer. The optical waveguide multi-cascaded coupling mode division multiplexer comprises an optical waveguide layer and a substrate layer, wherein the optical waveguide layer comprises a first optical waveguide and a second optical waveguide; the second optical waveguide comprise...