MEMS Littman tunable laser using curve-shaped blazed grating

The paper reports a MEMS Littman tunable laser with a new design, which makes use of a non-standard blazed grating to collimate and diffract the laser beam simultaneously. It exploits the advantages of MEMS fabrication to pattern the non-standard grating while avoiding the need for low-quality MEMS lenses. In addition, this design has high tolerance for misalignment. The MEMS structure is etched on a SOI wafer (structure layer 60 /spl mu/m thick) and is then integrated with the laser chip and optical fibers. Linear wavelength tuning is measured over a range of 9.2 nm.