31 January 2014

II-VI expands seed laser portfolio for pulsed fiber lasers

In booth #2136 at Photonics West 2014 in San Francisco (1-6 February), semiconductor laser manufacturer II-VI Laser Enterprise GmbH of Zurich, Switzerland is debuting new products from its expanded Seed Laser portfolio. These include a new Fabry-Perot (FP) laser diode module with ultra-broadband fiber Bragg grating (FBG) for high peak power pulsed fiber lasers and a distributed feedback (DFB) laser diode module designed for seeding of sub-nanosecond fiber and solid-state lasers.

II-VI Laser Enterprise is a subsidiary in the active optical products segment of engineering materials and optoelectronic components provider II-VI Inc of Saxonburg, PA, USA that was acquired last September from optical communications component maker Oclaro Inc of San Jose, CA, USA.

The expanded seed laser portfolio comprehensively addresses all pulsed fiber laser applications and includes:

• A DFB single-mode laser diode with an on-chip distributed feedback grating that enables pulsed fiber lasers to operate at picosecond pulse widths as well as enabling frequency conversion into green and UV wavelength ranges. Available at 1064nm and 1030nm, the seed laser is capable of high peak powers of up to 800mW for a pulse width as short as 150ps tunable up to 4ns with programmable pulse shapes and a spectral line-width well below 100pm.

• A FP seed laser module with a 4nm ultra-broadband chirped FBG, tailored to control spectral properties for the suppression of SBS (stimulated Brillouin scattering), a common problem in pulsed fiber lasers that occurs above 10ns pulse width and at high peak power operation of pulsed fiber lasers. Available at 1064nm, the module can be operated at peak currents of up to 2A.

• A narrow-band FBG FP laser module for pulsed frequency conversion applications. The laser module with less than 0.3nm bandwidth and FBG at a short distance is available at 1064nm and 1030nm.

All seed laser modules feature a standard telecom-grade butterfly-type package that includes a thermistor and back-facet monitor photodiode. Reliability of seed laser modules had been proven with pulsed reliability tests over 10,000 hours at 2A peak current. For the DFB seed laser, a multi-cell life-test of over 8000 hours at accelerated operating conditions has been performed with zero failures.

“As different applications and architectures for pulsed fiber lasers continue to grow, tailored seed solutions allow optimized material interaction and improved quality at the work piece,” says product line manager Dominik Jaeggi.

Technology development for this product has been supported partly by the EU-funded FP7 ALPINE project (number. 229231).

See related items:

Oclaro closes sale of Amplifier and Micro-Optics business to II-VI Inc

Oclaro sells Zurich GaAs laser diode business to II-VI for $115m

Tags: II-VI Inc

Visit: www.ii-vi.com/business_units/II-VI-Laser-Enterprise.html