A fortunate ancillary benefit of the massive investment in telecommunications sources has been in other areas requiring tunability at similar wavelengths such as measurement and fiber-optic sensing systems.
STEPHEN KREGER
Before the peak of the telecom investment bubble, tunable lasers were seen as a key network component that would increase network reliability and reduce costs of spare lasers. Startups like Iolon and Agility easily attracted investments in the tens of millions of dollars at each round of funding; even corporate giants such as Intel poured money into research and development.
But the telecom tunable laser boom did not materialize as planned, mostly because of rapidly declining costs and improved reliability of arrays of fixed-wavelength distributed-feedback (DFB) lasers.
After years of consolidation among tunable laser manufacturers, a number of vendors still survived, in part by taking advantage of higher margins afforded by integrating their products into test equipment, such as Luna’s optical-backscatter-reflectometry technology, and by tailoring their designs and lowering costs for applications outside the telecom market.
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