SEMICONDUCTOR LASER DEVELOPMENT IN CANADA FOR TELECOMMUNICATIONS APPLICATIONS

摘要

The enormous transmission capacity inherent in Optical fibre has been realized over the past lrty years through the use of semiconductor lasers in optical communication systems. Near the turn of the century, as much as seventy percent of the North American internet traffic was said to have traveled through optical communieation equipment made by the Canadian company, Nortel Networks. Lasers producing the optical signals in these systems were developed and manufactured in the Advanced Technology Laboratory, a research group with-In Nortel. This article describes the history of semiconductor laser development in the Laboratory from an early version of the stripe laser to the most sophisticated ridge wave- gulde, strained active layer multi-quantum-well dlevice with partially gain-coupled distributed feedback. These advancements are placed in the context of the evolution of Nortel's systems, which progressed from single wave-length 47Mb/s transmission, to a rate of 10Gb/s with eighty wavelengths multiplexed over one fiber. An overview of Canadian activities in optoelectronics pertaining to semiconductor lasers, both in co-operative efforts amongst academe, government laboratories and industry and In academic research, is also presented.