New laser-based light sources are highly desired for projection displays because of the need for longer lifetime, lower etendue, and higher color gamut. High power, frequency doubled red, green and blue (RGB) surface emitting diode laser arrays have been developed for use in low cost projection microdisplay television, digital cinema and pocket projectors. Single green lasers for pico-projectors using MEMS scanners have also been demonstrated.
Laser-based projection displays have long attracted interest because of the multiple advantages (expanded color gamut, high resolution, longer lifetime, etc.) expected from lasers as compared to lamps. However, most of these advantages have been largely negated by the significant cost, size, and cooling requirements associated with lasers, and their inability to produce red, green, and blue colors in the same platform. In this paper, we review a new, laser array
technology based of frequency-doubled, semiconductor, surface-emitting lasers. The key features of this technology, such as demonstrated multi-Watt output for rear-projection TVs, power levels scalable with the number of emitters, speckle suppression due to multi-emitter array, and a low-cost and compact design are discussed in detail.
Plastic optical fiber (POF) has long been seen as a potential medium for implementing simple, very low cost optical links, but has not yet found significant application in data communication. In the near future, this situation is likely to change, as a new generation of POF with dramatically improved optical properties becomes commercially available. Unlike conventional POF, the new POF is based on amorphous perfluorinated polymers that are transparent in the near infrared. In order to develop useful fibers based on these new polymer materials, it has been necessary to better understand their fundamental optical properties, and to develop methods for manufacturing low-loss fiber. Since the available manufacturing methods typically result in graded-index POF's with very non-ideal index profiles, the possibility of severe bandwidth limitations has long been a concern. In addition, significant improvements in connection loss will be required to support high-speed systems. In this paper, we describe techniques that we and others have developed to eliminate or overcome these obstacles.
KEYWORDS: Vertical cavity surface emitting lasers, Data transmission, Phase only filters, Multimode fibers, Optical interconnects, Signal attenuation, Optical fibers, Data communications, Local area networks, Chemical elements
In this paper, we report on some transmitter and optical fiber technologies for 10 Gb/s speed datacom systems. Primarily to enable direct flip-chip integration with silicon CMOS circuits for highly parallel interchip interconnects, we have fabricated 2D vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser arrays featuring 4*8 elements on a 250 micrometers pitch. Arrays emitting in the 980 nm spectral region exhibit excellent homogeneity and operation data like 0.8 mA threshold current, below 1.5 V threshold voltage, 1 mW output power at 2 mA current, and more than 35 percent conversion efficiency in the 2 to 5 mW power range. Bottom emission of 850 nm arrays is enabled by etching holes into the opaque GaAs substrate. Due to less efficient heat removal, devices are currently limited to about 2 mW light output at 6 mA current. Top-emitting 850 nm array elements have been employed for high-speed data transmission experiments. First we describe the characteristics of a new 50 micrometers core diameter silica multimode fiber that allows for 10 Gb/s data rate operation over a record distance of 1.6 km. Finally, a 9 Gb/s transmission experiment over 100 m length of a rather promising perfluorinated plastic optical fiber for low-cost data links is presented.
The ability to efficiently connect many high-speed parts is of critical importance for large- capacity data communications. High bandwidth, 2D optical planes can be employed to achieve such an interconnection and avoid electronic bottlenecks. A novel solution which dramatically increases the functionality of optical-plane interconnections uses wavelength multiplexing to facilitate one 2D optical plane interconnecting reconfigurably with many other planes. We report the first experimental demonstration of using wavelength multiplexing to facilitate reconfigurable interconnections between one pixel on the source plane and one pixel on each of several detector planes. We show the near-error-free 155 Mb/s transmission and detection of 3 different wavelengths at three detector planes.
The Multi-Anode Microchannel Array (MAMA) detector system is a true photon-counting imager which records the position and arrival time of each detected photon for post facto image reconstruction analysis. Imaging by time-tag photon detection with the MAMA is being used for image stabilization on sounding rockets, and for speckle interferometry and speckle image reconstruction at ground-based telescopes using the Stanford University Speckle Interferometer System (SUSIS). This paper describes the construction and mode-of-operation of the MAMA time-tag photon-detection system, including recent improvements to the data- handling system which permit a data-recording rate in excess of 1 M event s-1. The intrinsic time resolution of the MAMA detector system is < 300 ns and the time resolution of the SUSIS used to date is 3.2 microsecond(s) for each detected photon. A number of examples of both laboratory data and visible-light speckle interferometric deconvolutions and two-dimensional speckle image reconstructions are presented.
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