ABSTRACT
With the rapid rise of bandwidth demands, wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) systems have become the most promising technique to increase transmission bandwidth, being highly cost-effective as it does not require new installation of optical fibers. Tunable lasers are highly desirable for WDM systems [3] because they eliminate problems associated with temperature-dependent wavelength drift in monolithic multi-wavelength laser arrays, and enable active reconfiguration of transmission systems. Moreover, tunable lasers are required for characterization and qualification of other WDM components such as filters, multiplexer, demultiplexers, and tunable receivers. Further, low cost tunable lasers are highly important for enabling implementations of WDM systems in local area networks (LANs) [4] and byte-wide WDM optical interconnects between computers [5]. In addition to WDM applications, tunable lasers are also useful for spectroscopy, instrumentation, beam steering, interferometers, and a wide variety of other applications.
