Medical Photonics

Custom couplers, any split ratio. Even, asymmetric or anything in between — fused and micro-optic couplers built to your exact ratio, wavelength and package. An interferometer is only as good as the balance of its two arms, so ratio accuracy and low excess loss are where image quality starts — any imbalance here lands straight on the noise floor of the image. Tap couplers sample source power for monitoring and the k-clock reference without disturbing the main path.

Mini & ultra-mini circulators. Transmit and receive routed on one fiber with high isolation — in packages small enough to sit at the probe end of endoscopic and catheter-based OCT designs. That is where space is tightest and isolation matters most: the returning sample echo shares the launch fiber, and leakage between the two directions lands directly in the image.

Precision held at volume. Tight insertion-loss, return-loss, isolation and split-ratio tolerances with proven lot-to-lot consistency — because a medical platform in production for years needs every shipped engine to perform identically. Each device is measured against the same acceptance criteria the first article met, on the same test stations, for the life of the program.

Whole-engine integration. A swept-source OCT engine typically packs couplers, circulators, a reference-arm VOA, precision delay lines and trigger FBGs into one interferometric module. Send us your system block diagram; we return a spliced, tested optical subsystem — every fusion splice, pigtail and interface verified as a single unit, not a pile of parts.

k-clock and sweep trigger built in. Beyond the sample and reference arms, a production OCT engine carries a k-clock interferometer — a fixed precision delay line that turns the wavelength sweep into equally spaced optical-frequency samples — and a wavelength trigger that marks the start of every A-scan. Both ride on the same passive devices we supply: a fiber delay line, a fixed-wavelength FBG reflection, and the couplers and circulators that route them. Get the clocking wrong and the image warps; let the trigger jitter and A-scans stop aligning. These small parts decide whether the engine images or merely sweeps.