Agility Communications Awarded Tunable Laser Contract

SANTA BARBARA, Calif., March 20 -- Agility Communications Inc., a manufacturer of widely tunable components for metro, switching and long haul markets, announced today it was awarded a contract to develop widely tunable lasers with monolithically integrated modulators (EMLs). The $5.5 million contract is from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for its chip-scale wavelength division multiplexing (CS-WDM) program.

Under the CS-WDM program, the government is testing Agility's technology platforms that enable and support intelligent networks and systems for military applications. DARPA tests of Agility's widely tunable EMLs demonstrated that over a distance of 1080 kilometers, Agility's 2.5 Gb/s EML performed as well as a distributed feedback laser with an external lithium niobate modulator.

"These results show that monolithically integrated modulators have very small frequency chirps -- a remarkable result achieved by Agility Communications within the first year of the CS-WDM Program," said Jag Shah, program manager for the CS-WDM Program at DARPA.

For more information, visit: www.agility.com