June 14, 2005, Lohja, Finland--Liekki, a supplier of highly doped optical fibers, is also in the software business, producing programs that model fiber lasers and amplifiers. The company's Application Designer simulation environment enables engineers to model fiber-laser physics. Now, an upgrade by Liekki adds a transient-analysis capability to the package.
The software is dedicated to high-power laser and amplifier applications. The area of fiber lasers is booming, spurred by much research that has produced improvements enabling a fundamental-mode beam of a kilowatt or more to be emitted by a single fiber. Fiber lasers are compact, easy to cool, and require little or no alignment over their lifetime. But their small mode diameters result in high intensities in the fiber, which can produce nonlinear effects that degrade performance.
"Especially high-power fiber lasers and amplifiers are of utmost interest for companies in the military, aerospace, industrial manufacturing and medical sectors," noted William Willson, Liekki's vice president of marketing and sales. "The need for a good design tool is large. The Liekki software is able to simulate and analyze both continuous-wave and pulsed applications (including time-domain effects) using erbium or ytterbium-doped fibers as the gain medium."
The software now provides the ability to simulate the dynamic regime and transients of active components, said Mircea Hotoleanu, product manager for Liekki design software. "New components such as time-dependent signal sources and optical modulators have been added. Included in this upgrade is also the ability to calculate nonlinear-effect thresholds such as Brillouin scattering and Raman scattering, and the effect of refractive-index variation with optical power density."
Liekki designs, manufactures, and markets specialty optical fibers and fiber subassemblies (optical engines) for fiber amplifiers and lasers. The company is known for its proprietary direct-nanoparticle-deposition (DND) technology, which the company claims makes possible state-of-the-art highly doped fibers that minimize required fiber length and have high doping, large core-to-clad ratio, low photodarkening, flat refractive-index profile, high efficiency, and reduced nonlinear effects