September 1, 2010 | Photonics/Optics

Semiconductor Tapered Amplifiers

New Focus™ (Santa Clara, CA) has introduced a new series of semiconductor tapered amplifiers for high-power tunable and fixed-wavelength applications. The VAMP series is designed to accept many fiber-coupled seed sources, providing easy alignment and helping protect the chip from unintentional misalignment. The design includes output isolation, overcurrent protection, and input seed monitoring in every amplifier. These features also provide protection from self-lasing and other hazardous operating conditions. It produces in excess of 1W of tunable signal frequency radiation when seeded with an appropriate source, such as New Focus's Vortex II™ and Velocity® precision tunable lasers.