Oz when I saw the Denselight sensing presentation it reminded me of the laser assembly work they were doing with the yet to be named customer on high density CWDM (slide 16 of the AGM presentation). The sensing application for automotive LIDAR as shown on the new presentation is at 1550nm which is at the CWDM wavelength. At the time of the AGM Suresh reported this:

00:40:55 – A key thing with our dielectric waveguides also is that it is transparent from the visible to about two-micron wavelength. So we can apply it, like we are doing right now, in what is called the O band spectrum of light, which is around 1310 nm, which is what we using for our data communications products, but it is equally applicable to the C band and the L band, which is 1550 nm, 1650 nm, it is also applicable down at 850 nm and 900 nm, and then below that into the visible.

The O Band is used for LR4 and is less complex (and lower cost) which they were working on according to Suresh at the time of the AGM. It would appear that as of the Sept presentation they were progressing on the C band as we see characterization of both 0 band and C band in that presentation.

And now we can see the work they are doing on automotive LIDAR utilizing the C band. It indicates to  me that they are on a fairly well defined path of applications which we know in the case of high density is  being driven by a customer as per the comments bellow by Suresh at the AGM.

00:44:10 – This is an example of how the interposer would be used in the context of a laser assembly. This is actually a product that we’re working on now for another customer on the transmit side. So this is a CWDM, which stands for „coarse wavelength division multiplexing“. It’s four lasers, four wavelengths that are 20 nm apart, and a specific application could require either 4 or 12 or up to 16 of these lasers being placed onto the interposer. Why is this important? Because if you do it without an interposer, you have to place these individually and then align each one of them individually with the lenses that are required to insure the right amount of coupling. With our interposers, we promote a very high coupling efficiency between the lightsource and the waveguide. Our target is to be over 90 percent coupling efficiency versus – the norm in the industry is about 60 to 70 percent.

00:45:15 – That is one piece of it. The second piece is, we have advanced thermal management capability built into the interposer. The lasers are placed on the interposer, we have the ability to sink the heat out of these lasers in an efficient way. So that improves the performance of the lasers.

00:45:15 – And the third and probably most important is we passively place these lasers onto the interposer. So there’s no active alignment. When we sell a module with four to twelve lasers on it and provide it to the customer, they don’t need to – now actively – align twelve lasers or four lasers, it’s all pre-aligned for them, and it makes it easy for them to apply it in to their applications. So completely separate from the receive optical engines that we’ve been talking about over the past couple of quarters, this is another product application that we’re working with for another customer, also in the data center applications, utilizing the concepts of the interposer.