Two-dimensional scaling of ridge waveguide amplifiers

We have demonstrated the concept of scaling a large number of laser diodes to achieve high power with good beam quality. We have built a device which integrates 100 ridge waveguide amplifiers (1-D scaling) with a coherent optical signal distribution network and phase modulators on a 12.2 mm X 4.4 mm chip called a unit cell. We also achieved coherent combining from 200 waveguide amplifiers by stacking two unit cells (2-D scaling), and are currently working on stacking ten unit cells.