Finisar at the 2011 Sensors Expo

This week’s blog post comes from Pritha Khurana, Product Line Manager of Finisar’s Active Components.

The week before last (June 6-8, 2011) we were at Sensors Expo – the North American conference focused on Sensors and Sensor Integrated Systems – located at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, Illinois. Just like last year, the show took place alongside ESC Chicago (focused on Embedded Systems) and attendees had the option to check out each shows Expo floor.

At this year’s Sensors Expo, Finisar showcased our Active Components product line – including our industry leading high volume VCSEL technology. Finisar VCSEL’s superior reliability even in non-hermetic environments, low drive current, high coupled power, narrow and circularly symmetric beam and versatile packaging options are enabling solutions not possible with other optical technologies.

Finisar showcased the versatility of the VCSELs via several demos – One focused on velocity and particle size detection based on VCSEL being a coherent source of light. Another demo showed the superior performance of the VCSEL in edge detection over an LED due to its narrow beam divergence. The final demonstration highlighted the advantages of how VCSELs significantly reduced power consumption versus an LED (by virtue of higher power at similar drive currents).

We’re proud to share that there are over 100M VCSELs currently in the field and a wide variety of available VCSELs (single mode, multi-mode, high power (>200mW), high efficiency, multiple wavelengths) that can be used to develop many different sensors!