Rare-earth-doped Porous Si Intrafed LEDs for High-speed Fiber-optic Communications

This program will develop high power diode lasers in compact packages with fiber optic output. The approach will involve design, fabrication, and mounting of single high power CW diode laser array bars and the fiber pigtailing of these bars into completed laser modules. The approach will be to use single array bar packages, thereby avoiding the expensive "rack and stack" design. A single 1-cm array bar package will be pigtailed into a 400 micron diameter core fiber, with an expected CW output power in the 10W level. The uniqueness of the proposed approach is that it will utilize Spire's previously developed low cost laser array bar fabrication techniques, and provide for the coupling of these bars into a single fiber delivery system. Spire uses proprietary fluxless vacuum soldering for mounting 1 cm, coated array bars without solder voids, and proposes to use all-refractive optics for efficient fiber coupling. The Phase I effort will result in the delivery of a proof-of-concept fiber-coupled demonstrator emitting at the 10W level. Future Phase II work will be directed at extending this approach into the 50-100W level.