Omron Tateisi Electronics Co.

Norihiro Ota

Tsukasa Yamashita

Masaharu Matano

Kazuhiko Mori

A plurality of incident light beams are parallelly propagated in a thin film optical waveguide. Simultaneously, a surface acoustic wave is propagated in said thin film optical waveguide, and the plurality of incident light beams are selectively successively guided to a light output part by the acousto-optic effect of said by Bragg diffraction. The diffraction light beams are serially output. In this way optical data parallelly input are directly converted into optical data in a serial state.

Parallel-to-serial conversion of optical data using acousto-optical

A tunable semiconductor laser has an active layer, an insulating film made of a piezoelectric material and formed on a portion of the active layer, and an interdigital transducer provided on the insulating film for generating a surface acoustic wave. The laser oscillation wavelength is variable by varying the wavelength of the surface acoustic wave generated by the transducer. When adapted to produce surface acoustic waves of different frequencies at different locations, the transducer affords an enlarged tunable wavelength band. A plurality of Gunn diodes effecting oscillation at different frequencies are usable in place of the transducer.

Tunable semiconductor laser

By an electro-optical switch or an optical switch element utilizing diffraction by a surface acoustic wave, an input light beam is first switched over to one of light beams two or a multiple of two in number and propagating in different directions. By a surface acoustic wave which is discretely variable in frequency, the light beam in each of the different propagation direction is deflected at angles in accordance with the varying frequencies while propagating through an optical waveguide layer. It is possible to obtain by switching a very large total number of output light beams which are equal in number to the number of resolvable deflected light beams obtained in the frequency bandwidth of one surface acoustic wave, multiplied by the number of light beams obtained by switching with the optical switch element.

Growing community of inventors

Saitama, Japan

Norihiro Ota