Laser companies get in gear for ECOC
A swathe of laser diode makers are commencing shipments of new products prior to the 33rd European Conference and Exhibition on Optical Communication, aka ECOC 2007.
The conference, being held in Berlin from 16 to 20 September, will see Finisar demonstrating its newly available Fabry-Perot laser diode transmitter optical sub-assemblies (TOSAs).
The Sunnyvale, California, company says these 1310 nm InGaAsP laser modules are inherently cheaper and consume less power than competing distributed feedback lasers.
Finisar pairs its TOSAs with PIN detector-based receiver optical sub-assemblies (ROSAs). It says its Fabry-Perot based TOSA-ROSA pairs are the first in the world made for the 10GBASE-LRM standard, and is currently producing hundreds of thousands of Fabry-Perot lasers per month.
Also pushing TOSAs is Finisar s Californian neighbor, San Jose based Bookham, which is demonstrating 2.5 Gb/s TOSA modules for the first time at ECOC.
The “in-production” theme, does continue however, with Bookham announcing that its LambdaFLEX 10 Gb/s tunable transmitter assemblies (TTAs) are now fully Telcordia qualified.
“Bookham is driving the development of tunable technology, with hundreds of our TTAs being shipped to tier one customers,” said the company.
Bookham is also promising an interesting-sounding live demonstration of how its single-chip InP LambdaFLEX TTAs work at ECOC "“ the first of its type in Europe, according to the firm.
Avanex is another optical communication firm looking to promote tunable lasers at ECOC. It is planning to showcase the expansion of its existing tunable dispersion compensator and amplification platform, which goes by the name PowerShaper, to 40 Gb/s.
And, at the basic component level, Eblana Photonics of Dublin, Ireland, will be promoting its recently-shipped 1310 and 1550 nm laser diodes for 10 Gb/s applications.
Eblana says its diodes exhibit low noise and have an ultra-narrow emission line-width, which remains below 100 kHz, even at emitted powers as low as 500 ?W.
