Technical Insight
Agility integrates modulators and amplifiers with its tunable lasers (Fiber News)
Tunable laser manufacturer Agility Communications has successfully integrated an electroabsorption modulator into its widely-tunable sampled-grating (SG) DBR laser, which targets 2.5 and 10 Gbit/s metro core applications. Agility employs a monolithic InP device architecture to integrate functions such as modulation and optical amplification onto a single chip (see Compound Semiconductor November 2000, p34). A beta customer base of 30 companies includes startups such as Atoga, Network Photonics, and Mahi, which are currently sampling Agility s 4 mW C-band (15251565 nm) tunable laser. "The significance of the electroabsorption modulated laser technology is that we re able to integrate both the amplifier and modulator and still get the same yields we ve achieved with our other lasers," explained Ron Nelson, Agility s president and CEO. "By integrating many capabilities onto one chip, we lower the overall capital and operating expenditures for carriers," he said. In Agility s device, a semiconductor optical amplifier and modulator are integrated after the front mirror of the SG-DBR laser. The company says the inclusion of an optical amplifier compensates for a trade-off in power that occurs when designing with a wide tuning range cavity design, which in Agility s case includes 91 ITU channels spaced at 50 GHz with a side mode suppression ratio of 40 dB. The device offers over 18 mW of power across the C-band with less than 1.5 dB variation in power, and is housed in a 2 3 0.5 inch package.
