Demonstration of a tunable hybrid laser diode using an electrostatically tunable silicon micromachined Fabry-Perot interferometer device

A previously reported silicon micromachined Fabry-Perot interferometer device is used for the first time with an edge-emitting single-quantum-well high-power laser diode in an extremely short external cavity configuration to realize a tunable laser diode. This hybrid configuration is advantageous in that it allows the use of "off-the-shelf" components, loose adjustment tolerances and potentially has low cost. In the current demonstration, external optical feedback from the extremely short-external-cavity, formed by such hybridization of the laser diode and the micro-optoelectro-mechanical device, resulted in a 4-nm range of quasi-continuous tuning with tens of milliwatts of output power.