A high-speed mixed digital-to-analog circuit board for accurate control of wavelength tunable lasers for fiber-optic communications

A mixed digital-to-analog (D/A) high speed circuit board capable of driving a tunable super structure grating distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) laser is developed. The circuit is used to control the laser over a 20-nm tuning wavelength range with 0.1 nm resolution. Three control currents are preprogrammed into an electrically erasable/programmable read-only memory (EEPROM) look-up table for each wavelength. Upon receiving a differential logic control signal, the circuit tunes the laser to the specified output wavelength within 500 ns. The long-term repeatability of the tuned laser output wavelength shows drift below /spl plusmn/0.02 nm with greater than 100 h of operation.