Widely Tunable Twin-Guide Laser Diodes With Sampled Gratings: Design and Performance

The widely tunable twin-guide laser diode with sampled gratings is a monolithically integrated device that utilizes a vertical integration scheme to realize an electronically and widely tunable distributed feedback (DFB)-type laser. Owing to its DFB- type structure, it possesses many advantages, such as large continuous tuning ranges, simple wavelength tuning scheme, and promising dynamic characteristics. In this paper, we detail on the design of the sampled grating tunable twin-guide laser and discuss its performance. Recent devices achieve tuning ranges over 40 nm along with high side-mode suppression (ges35 dB) as well as large output power (ges10 mW).