ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 12 -- United States Patent no. 12,298,436, issued on May 13, was assigned to Bandwidth10 LTD..

"Depth mapping sensing apparatus" was invented by Carlos Fernando Rondina Mateus (Berkeley, Calif.), Christopher Chase (Berkeley, Calif.), Michael C. Y. Huang (Taipei, Taiwan), Murat Serbay (Berlin), Stefano Prandoni (Berlin) and Philip Worland (Berkeley, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A monitoring device system has a tunable VCSEL laser having one or more active regions including quantum wells and barriers. The active regions are surrounded by one or more p-n junctions. The one or more active regions can include a selected shape structure, as well as one or more tunnel ...