A Wide wavelength tunable laser is needed for Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) and Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexing (ROADM) networks, since it realizes flexible network, effectively employing wavelength resources, and inventory cost reduction. Several types currently exist, but they all are difficult to produce; that is, their mass producibility is not high and they have many components. In particular, monolithically integrated wavelength tunable lasers, such as DFB array, and SG(Sampled Grating)-DBR based structures, have been developed. While these lasers have good performance, they require complex InP growth steps and processing. The external cavity lasers also have good performance, but require precise manual assembly and have moving parts. We have proposed novel tunable laser consisting of silica waveguide ring resonator connected directly to semiconductor optical amplifier. This laser structure has several advantages, such as a simple laser structure suitable for mass-production and high reliability due to having a stable thermal optic phase shifter and no moving parts. This paper gives recent progress in waveguide ring resonator based tunable laser. Low loss and high performance silica waveguide ring resonator, which was suitable for tunable laser, was successfully fabricated using high index contrast SiON core. Double-ring resonators successfully attained 45-nm and 160-nm wavelength tuning operations, which was the largest wavelength tuning range in a tunable laser with no mechanical moving parts reported to date. Triple-ring resonator demonstrated stable full L-band tuning operations with 50-GHz wavelength spacing. We believe that silica waveguide ring resonator based tunable laser is very suitable for not only mass production, but also widely wavelength tuning and stable single mode operations.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.