Wavelength control of integrated semiconductor lasers with tunable intra-cavity arrayed waveguide gratings operating at 1.7 μm

In this contribution we present a control method and its experimental verification for a laser which wavelength is controlled using tunable arrayed waveguide gratings (AWGs). This device has been fabricated monolithically on a single InP chip. The 35 mm-long ring laser cavity contains two tunable intra-cavity AWGs and two strained InGaAs quantum well (QW) optical amplifiers with optical gain around 1.7 μm wavelength. The components are connected using passive waveguides. The tunable AWGs are controlled by electro-optic voltage-controlled phase modulators (PHMs) in the arms of the waveguide array. These PHMs need to be controlled individually to tune the laser to a specific wavelength. The layout of the laser is depicted in Fig. 1(a). It is identical to a quantum dot (QD) based laser reported in [1].