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Company Overview Covega Corporation has established world-class proprietary technologies in InP and LiNbO3 to produce high performance optical devices and modules at a low cost with a very small footprint. Today, Covega is a leading provider of state-of-the-art opto-electronic components and subsystems with a wide range of products and services to meet the needs of its diverse customer base. Covega’s differentiator is in its superior product performance based on its proprietary intellectual properties in InP and LiNbO3 technologies. With early focus on the telecom, datacom and CATV industries, Covega now generates over one-third of its revenue from serving the defense, medical, industrial, sensing, test & measurement and instrumentation industries.
Technologies
The company’s Single Angle Facet (SAF) solution permits superior performance for external cavity tunable lasers by providing broad bandwidth, high power and stable operation. The enhanced functionality is achieved by using a proprietary SAF and reliable ridge waveguides. The result is a substantial cost savings for the gain chips, while maintaining peak performance versus the conventional anti-reflection coating approach. Covega’s Semiconductor Optical Amplifier (SOA) line of products delivers industry-leading performance in high saturation power, large gain and low noise figure. Covega InP devices are based on highly efficient multi-quantum well structures. Manufacturing processes are based on well proven six-sigma-based chip fabrication processes. Covega InP products deliver high gain, wide bandwidth and are ideally suited for communication systems, instrumentation, photonics sensors, scientific applications and fiber optic gyros. Covega products can be used in a wide variety of applications that include commercial and military applications.
The company’s LiNbO3 technology offers a family of high performance, Telcordia-compliant, external optical intensity and phase modulators with industry leading long-term reliability. The intensity modulators are based on Mach-Zehnder interferometers and are fabricated using titanium diffused Lithium Niobate substrates. Our exclusive bias trimming technology allows for the operation of intensity modulators near-zero volts at any desired operating point (quadrature, maximum or minimum). This application helps the user to achieve a substantial cost saving and operability enhancement in various telecom and non-telecom system applications. Covega modulators are based on x-cut and z-cut LiNbO3 wafers and can be configured to either zero-chirp or a fixed chirp. Modulators for emerging telecom applications like dual quadrature phase shift key modulation (DQPSK) are in development and early samples are available. Manufacturing processes are controlled using six-sigma processes leading to high yields and repeatability. Covega LiNbO3 products deliver superior performance over 10 Gb/s to 40 Gb/s and are ideally suited for communication systems, interferometric fiber optic gyroscopes and other defense and space applications. Covega’s fab-light and fab-less customers take advantage of our fully vertically integrated InP and LiNbO3 capabilities and foundry services which include device design and modeling, wafer fabrication and growth and advanced device packaging.
Products
Covega InP product families include SAF gain block, Semiconductor Optical amplifiers, Booster Optical Amplifiers (BOAs), Fabry–Perot Lasers, Broad Area Lasers, and Superluminescent diodes (SLD). Chip-on-submount, chip-on-heat-sink and butterfly or DIL package versions are also available. Covega InP products cover a wide wavelength range from 1050 nm to 1850 nm and find their applications in telecommunication, medical instrumentation and sensors. Covega LiNbO3 product families include 10 Gb/s and 40 Gb/s zero chirp and fixed chirp intensity modulators, 10 Gb/s modulators integrated with variable optical attenuators, modulators integrated with drivers and chirp controlled phase modulators.
Applications
Covega devices find applications in various industries, including:
Telecom: Covega Lithium Niobate modulators are used as external modulators for transmission modules in optical networking and CATV. Our SOAs are used in pre-amplification, booster amplification, inline amplification, switching, wavelength conversion and 2-R regeneration. Covega SAFs are being used as gain chips for external cavity tunable lasers. Our Fabry-Perot lasers and SLDs are being used in the emerging Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) applications such as WDM-PON, EPON and GPON.
Biomedical: Covega SLDs are being used as low-coherence broadband sources in critical biomedical applications like optical coherence tomography (OCT) and optical imaging. Our BOAs are being used as gain sources in high-speed frequency-swept ring lasers for the emerging applications like the frequency-domain OCT.
Test and Measurement: Covega SAFs and BOAs are used as gain mediums for various test and measurement equipment such as channel monitoring and performance testing of optical networks.
Sensors and Homeland Security: Covega Lithium Niobate phase modulators and SLDs are used for fiber optic gyroscopes. Covega SLDs are also optimized as broadband sources for various emerging sensing applications like fiber optic strain and temperature measurement using fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs).
Expertise and Facilities
Members of Covega’s technology team are pioneers in high power semiconductor lasers, optical amplifiers and LiNbO3 modulators. The team’s experience encompasses materials, device design, wafer growth and fabrication, processing, advanced E/O device packaging, manufacturing and system engineering. Members of the management team are industrial veterans with prior experience from Lucent Technologies, Nortel Networks, Newport Corporation, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Motorola, Honeywell, Bosch Telecom and Optelecom. Covega has a 40,000 sq. ft. facility in central Maryland, which includes 18,000 sq. ft. class 100 and 10,000 clean room facilities.
All work is performed under strict quality control standards. Covega is a vertically integrated company with full Indium Phosphide and Lithium Niobate capabilities and foundry services in-house, which include device design & modeling, wafer growth & fabrication and advanced E/O device packaging. Customers take advantage of our turnkey capabilities from design through chip and module fabrication to address their unique product requirements in various applications.
Covega’s core technologies provide customers with high performance solutions with more robust optical components and modules carrying much smaller footprints. In addition to its core technologies, the Covega team also has a depth of network and system experience, which allows the company to work effectively with the customers’ system designers to provide the best solutions at an applications level.
Intellectual Property
Covega holds a large intellectual property portfolio of over twenty granted patents and many more patents pending. The patents granted enable:
» Novel high-speed and high power designs
» Leading edge modulation solutions
» Low-cost hermetic packaging
» Monolithic integration
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