A tunable laser requires some means of robustly locking to a specific frequency to meet QoS requirements for the telcom industry.

A version of a locker had been developed but was implemented as a separate component. Our key customers and potential acquisition partners rather strongly suggested that the locker needed to integrated with the tunable laser in the same package -without increasing the footprint-. This was a rather daunting request and required a complete redesign of not only the locker, but the automated assembly equipment being designed for high volume production.

We were fortunate to have creative optical designers who worked with our coating experts to come up with a design that could be integrated with the laser components -if- they they could re-laid out in the package. Which we did.

The design, prototyping, testing and release were accomplished within a few months Several patents were generated in the process.

And it worked quite well.

The functional product and performance specifications were met, but the design utilized a rather high part/process count which drove up product cost. It was expected that process improvement and automated assembly could drive this down at some point, but would take yet another redesign and process rollout.

We had some latitude as a newly acquired company, but time and money are never unlimited and market pricing elasticity was still quite volatile at the time. The business case would have to be made for a next iteration.