Kamelian attracts further funds and a new investor
Hoya is well established in the optics industry, but in recent years has been diversifying into new areas, including SiC substrates (see related story).
To date Kamelian’s products have been relatively simple InP-based optical preamplifiers and optical power boosters. However, at OFC in March the company revealed an all-optical wavelength converter, the product upon which the company’s name is based and towards which it has been working since it began.
The wavelength converter uses two SOAs on either silica waveguide arm of an interferometer in a similar arrangement to a Mach-Zehnder modulator, except that there are two inputs, a tunable CW light source and the data signal. The wavelength of the output is set by changing the wavelength of the tunable CW input. If the tunable laser is set to the same wavelength as the data input, the device acts as a simple 2R regenerator so that the signal is reamplified and reshaped.
The product demonstrates Kamelian’s technology for integrating its InP SOAs with silica passive components, something that could be useful in other devices for fiber-optic networks.
