This paper reviews the prospects for "femtosecond technology" which will provide an innovative and fundamentally new industrial technology based on ultrafast electronics and quantum optics occurring in the femtosecond time domain. The outline of the femtosecond technology project sponsored by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) is also reviewed.

A novel structure of guided-wave electro-optic modulators is proposed and their operation of the optical intensity modulation is successfully confirmed. The modulators use a newly developed modulation electrode consisting of coupled microstrip lines. A high voltage can be induced by the resonance of the odd propagation mode to realize efficient electro-optic modulation in spite of the microstrip-line configuration. The properties of the coupled microstrip lines were analytically evaluated by using the method of conformal transformations and the effectiveness as a modulation electrode was presented. The modulation electrodes of the half-wavelength coupled microstrip line resonator were designed at 10 GHz and 26 GHz, where the electrode lengths were 3 mm and 1.2 mm, respectively. The modulators using these electrodes with the Mach-Zehnder interferometer of LiTaO3 waveguides were fabricated. The measured modulation coefficient of the 26 GHz modulator normalized at 100 mW signal input was 0.13 rad.

A numerical method is introduced which is suitable for mode analysis in an optical resonator with complicated refractive-index variations such as vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs). In this method, the optical field of a laser mode is expressed as a linear combination of component fields with their coefficents to be determined. After a hypothetical boundary is set surrounding the region to be analyzed, the component fields are obtained by numerically integrating the wave equation in the inside region using the conditions on part of the boundary as the initial values of the integration. The total field, which is a linear combination of these fields, satisfies the equation and the selected part of the boundary conditions regardless of the coefficients. The conditions imposed on the total field on the rest of the boundary lead to a matrix eigenvalue problem, from which the optical frequency and the coefficients are obtained. The matrix expresses only boundary conditions and, therefore, its size is much smaller than that of a matrix expressing bulk conditions, as appears in the finite element method or the finite difference method. At the same time, this method has the advantage of adaptability for graded-index problems in contrast to conventional boundary formalisms such as the boundary element method and the mode matching method, because in the present method the component fields (or base functions) are calculated for individual index distributions while in these methods an inflexible set of base functions is used. As an example of the application of the method, mode properties in gain-guided VCSELs are analyzed using this method based on a two-dimensional model. This is the first model that takes into account the effects of standing-wave formation in the resonator and of the incident angle- and polarization-dependence of reflectivity. The ability to treat these effects makes the present method suitable for VCSELs equipped with a thin active layer and with multi-layer reflectors. Basic properties including polarization, threshold gain, oscillation wavelegths, and deflection of far-field patterns have been predicted for various cavity sizes and for various gradients in gain distributions. The major results of the analysis are: TE modes have lower thresholds than TM modes; the laser beam can be steered by tailoring the gain distribution as with edge-emitting lasers.

Beam-steering devices are attractive for spatial optical interconnections. Those devices are essential not only for fixed connecting routed optical interconnections, but for flexible connecting routed optical interconnections. The flexible connecting routed optical interconections are more powerful than the conventional fixed connecting routed ones. Structures and characteristics of beam-steering devices, a beam-scanning laser diode and a fringe-shifting laser diode, are reported for those interconnections. Using these lasers, the configurations of several optical interconnections, such as optical buses and optical data switching links as examples of fixed and flexible connecting routed optical interconnections are discussed.

A novel structure of a resonator type guided-wave electro-optic intensity modulator is introduced that uses a higher-order harmonic resonant electrode of coupled microstrip lines combined with polarization-reversed structure. The light modulation cancellation caused by the light transit-time effect in the resonant electrode, which is longer than the wavelength of the standing wave, is compensated for to enhance modulation efficiency. The modulator for 26 GHz operation was designed and fabricated with a LiTaO3 substrate. The modulation electrode is 9.03 mm long for seventh order harmonic resonance by RF signal. The workability of the modulator was confirmed by experiments with 1.3 µm wavelength light.