JDSU said today it has created the smallest widely tunable transmitter optical subassembly (TOSA) available for the dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) transceiver market. It made the announcement at Photonics West 2008 (Booth 1327), during which it also announced it can now combine thin-film and liquid crystal polymer technologies to produce custom birefringent components by enabling the use of polarized light in a "novel manner" to create new features in a variety of markets. "The new TOSA represents a dramatic reduction in size and cost compared to previous discrete solutions for tunable transmitters," the company said in a statement. "The new TOSA brings full band tunability, or the ability for service providers to change to any wavelength on demand, to pluggable small form factor (XFP) transceivers that previously only supported one to two wavelengths." TOSAs are housed in optical transceivers, the key interfaces to optical networks that convert electrical data to optical signals and back again as they travel through DWDM networks. JDSU said its new TOSA will enable service providers to use pluggable small-form-factor products to support 50GHz channel spacing in metro area networks, as traffic continues to grow in this area due to increased use of voice, video and data applications among consumers. It houses JDSU’s integrated laser Mach-Zehnder (ILMZ) chip, announced in September, and the ILMZ is a photonic integrated circuit that combines a tunable laser and optical modulator on a tiny chip. JDSU produces the ILMZ using semiconductor-style manufacturing which allows it to be produced in high volumes. The company said it will begin selling transceiver products that use the new TOSA package later this year. The new waveplate technology, JDSU said, is particularly suited for use in applications requiring miniaturization, high resolution, or high contrast such as remote sensing, front projection display, confocal microscopy, optical tweezers/trapping and astronomy. It said it has already commercialized its custom contrast enhancement products for the front projection display industry and is prototyping its new waveplate technology with companies in biomedical applications and optical data storage,particularly for future applications. “JDSU’s unique technology combination is opening the door to emerging applications in laser projection, optical tweezers, confocal microscopy and high-density optical data storage, for example -- that particularly value high-precision solutions,” said Barry Weitzenberg, general manager of JDSU’s Advanced Optical Technologies, Custom Optics Product Group. “This advance also enables customers to replace two components with one, which makes their products more durable, reliable and cost-effective.” Russell Chipman, a professor of optical sciences at the University of Arizona, said, “In our imaging polarimetry research using the new JDSU technology, we have been able to observe polarization vortices and specially designed point spread functions of very high fidelity with minimal depolarization demonstrating that the liquid crystal polymer technology is ready to enable many new optics applications." The company is also exhibiting new commercial lasers at Photonics West, including its L4 Series laser diode platform that includes a 10-W 9xx-nm fiber-coupled diode laser for medical, industrial and direct diode applications; the newest member of its FCD platform, a fiber-based 20-mw, 505-nm continuous wave laser; and a Q-switched ultraviolet laser that provides >24 W of average power at 355-nm in a high-quality beam, suitable for high-throughput semiconductor and microelectronics material processing. JDSU experts are presenting a variety of papers and are chairing several sessions at Photonics West on topics including: JQ-switched fiber lasers with controlled pulse shape Power scaling of fiber-based amplifiers seeded by microchip lasers Pulse energy and pulse width control in high-power, internally frequency converted, Q-switched Nd:YAG lasers Solid-state 488nm laser based on external-cavity frequency doubling of a multi-longitudinal mode semiconductor laser High-power, high-efficiency fiber-coupled multimode laser-diode pump module (800-1000nm) with high-reliability OPS lasers and VECSELs Applications of solid-state lasers Diode laser systems and pump modulesFor more information, visit: www.jdsu.com