Agility Wins Government Contract to Advance Tunable Lasers

Agility Communications Inc. of Santa Barbara, Calif., has received a contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under its chip-scale wavelength division multiplexing program to develop widely tunable lasers with monolithically integrated modulators. The program's objective is to develop multifunctional photonic chips for WDM networks in military defense applications. Testing has shown that, over a distance of 1080 km, Agility's 2.5-Gb/s electro-absorptive modulator laser has performed as well as a distributed feedback laser with an external lithiumniobate modulator. The contract will be valued at $5.5 million if funded through three project phases.