Laser Drivers

The transmission capacity of communication systems has evolved tremendously over the past 150 years, bringing borders, people and places closer together. Arguably the first step in this journey was the made by Samuel Morse, when he transmitted the first electrical telegraph message in 1844. Following in his footsteps, a Scotsman by the name of Alexander Graham Bell furthered the drive for innovation into the Electric era, by realizing the transmission of spoken words by electric currents through a telegraph wire; his invention was the telephone in 1876. Trends in analog and eventually digital communications continued profusely through the electronic and into the microelectronic era with the inauguration and expansion of wireless and satellite links. Again and again scientist and engineers managed to exploit bandwidths and push the limits of information travel until constraints of practicality due to noise, interference, power, cost and other issues began limiting progress. An analogous progression to the evolution of communication, would be one of personal travel, whereby, although man has reached the practical limits of water (telegraph), land (telephone) and atmospheric/aircraft (wireless) based travel, the speed and achievement of space travel are not limited by any inherent boundaries of space, rather only by our inabilities to supply the adequate technological means. The equivalent bottlenecks in the exploitation of fibre’s seamlessly unlimited bandwidth lay at and in between the electrical-optical/optical-electrical transducer interfaces of today’s fastest optical links; a key part of which is the laser or modulator driver.