Tunable Photonics Corporation receives $7 million in venture capital financing - Business - Brief Article - Statistical Data Included

Fiber Optics Business, Nov 15, 2001

Tunable Photonics Corp. announced that it has closed its Series A round of financing with a total of $7 million in venture capital financing. Blueprint Ventures of San Francisco, CA and Forrest, Binkley and Brown of Newport Beach, CA each invested $3 million, with The United Company of Bristol, VA providing $1 million.

Tunable Photonics produces components for fiber optic communications. Its products include a wavelength locker and wavelength mapper for widely tunable lasers, which are expected to displace fixed wavelength lasers in the Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) market. Tunable Photonics' technology is protected by several pending patents.

The Tunable Photonics wavelength locker uses a proprietary tunable etalon to lock any tunable laser to any communications channel wavelength under software control. "All makers of widely tunable lasers are our customer base," said Dr. Carl Kukkonen, Tunable Photonics CEO. "We provide very high speed channel switching and a tiny, low cost product that can fit into their laser package." Tunable Photonics also produces an external locker and a locker for fixed wavelength lasers.

The wavelength mapper is used to characterize widely tunable lasers during their manufacturing. "We can map a Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser (VCSEL) in less than a second," Dr. Kukkonen said. "This is one hundred times faster than competing approaches. More complicated lasers take only a few minutes to map."

"Active components for tunable lasers will play a key role in the build-out of the optical networks of tomorrow", says Christopher Kersey, a partner at Blueprint Ventures. "Tunable Photonics is a highly energized, cutting-edge technology company with a world-class team of laser experts who will be on the forefront of developing next-generation optical components.