drive assembly 40 are attached to an aluminum block 16 which is screwed to a heatsink plate 18 the heatsink plate 18 is attached to a collimator mount 24 which in turn is attached to mounting bracket 20 collimator mount 24 also holds a collimator lens 22 the stabilized laser 10 is aligned to writer optics not shown in an alternate embodiment the stabilized laser 10 is coupled to an optical fiber allowing the stabilized laser 10 to be mounted at a remote location 0037 fig3 shows a graph of power versus input current for a 50 mw mitsubishi 1413 r01 semiconductor laser with a threshold just above 30 ma and a maximum current of 90 ma when the dc level is set to 60 ma the laser provides 25 mw of output which is half of the rated value the ac signal provided by a colpitts rf oscillator is added to the applied dc level to swing the laser current from 30 ma i th laser threshold to 90 ma i op the maximum rated optical power out laser power i op is 50 mw for this laser and at i th it is approximately 0 1 mw optical power the semiconductor laser is turned on to maximum power and essentially turned off during each cycle of the rf the rf frequency is typically about 200 mhz for a writer system with a pixel clock of approximately 20 mhz thereby turning the laser on and off about 10 times during each pixel the sine.