FTL-Center

Blog on Electronically Tunable Lasers, Part 1: Introduction

John Dunne, CMO

Welcome to Intune’s FTL-Center (Fast Tunable Laser), where we will be posting some articles and blogs about this new type of technology component and its application into innovative system designs. This is of course a type of advanced technology which until now has been a highly specialised topic, accessible only to the scientific community that were involved in its development. However now that the technology has matured over a period of 18 years, I believe that enough work has been done in the field to start talking about its real-world application and value. In fact, I think that it is going to become a key technology for the next generation of Information Technology (IT) systems that are starting to touch everyone’s personal and business lives.

I’m talking about truly interactive systems where humans can use large amounts of data in real-time for communication, entertainment, research or business purposes. I also believe that each application can provide social or economic benefits or combinations of the two. So where to begin?

It is such a large topic to take on, that I will tackle it piece by piece in a series of postings under the heading: “Electronically Tunable Lasers”, all of which will be archived here. This may lead to other spin-off topics for various applications and discussions which will be linked to as necessary. I will be giving my reactions and opinions with references and links that I think are relevant on stuff that I’ve been interested in for the past 15 years. This is not supposed to be an encyclopaedia!

Here are the topics I will be discussing over the coming weeks if you want to check back and read something of interest. By the way, I am hoping to make the topic more accessible to readers who are not deep scientists - I’ve had so many conversations over the years with “rigorous scientific minds” that I know these articles may not live up to their standards!

1. Introduction

2. Optical technology
3. The history of the laser
4. What is an electronically tunable laser?
5. State of the art
6. Manufacturing
7. Calibration
8. Control
9. Applications and Markets
10. Social and economic value
11. Vision for the future

I hope that anyone who reads this stuff will enjoy learning a bit more about this exciting technology and find it useful. Please feel free to email me at john.dunne@intunetech.com or post a comment (when we get the website fully operational).