Reliability study of 1.55-μm DBR lasers grown in three MOVPE steps

Broadly tunable high-speed light sources are very attractive for high capacity wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) transmission and photonic-switching systems. The wavelength tunable distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) is a promising device for these applications. However, for system applications, the reliability of tunable devices must be very high: in particular, each accessible wavelength must be selected by a current staying stable hours after hours. A serious doubt has recently been cast on the DBR laser aging behavior. Based on an accelerated aging study performed on DBR lasers, exhibiting relatively poor characteristics, this previous work demonstrates that the tuning section degrades more rapidly than the active section