By submitting this form, you are agreeing to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
A tunable laser has an operating wavelength that can be adjusted in a precise way. Only a few kinds of lasers allow continuous tuning over a sizable wavelength range, even though all laser gain mediums permit minor shifts in output wavelength.
For device characterization, such as of photonic integrated circuits, a tunable laser can be utilised. In optical fibre communications using wavelength division multiplexing, a tunable laser can act as a backup in the event that one of the fixed-wavelength lasers for the specific channels malfunctions.
The Global Tunable Laser Source Module market accounted for $XX Billion in 2021 and is anticipated to reach $XX Billion by 2030, registering a CAGR of XX% from 2022 to 2030.
Tunable Laser Source Is Introduced By Keysight Technologies. The automated adjustment of wavelength-selective devices is sped up by the tunable laser, and test engineers can validate more devices per hour than they can with the versions that are currently on the market.
The filter slope, isolation, polarisation dependence, insertion loss, and reflectivity of multiplexers/demultiplexers, channel interleavers, and wavelength-selective switches used in reconfigurable optical fibre networks are measured using tunable lasers in conjunction with optical power metres and a polarisation controller.
Component manufacturers must adhere to practically optimal channel requirements, leaving next to no tolerance for measurement uncertainty, because ROADMs (reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexers) cascade filter forms along the path of fast modulation-broadened signals.
The 81606A tunable laser source, which has much more functionality than 81600B laser, the industry standard for more than a decade, responds to the needs of manufacturers of optical components for more effective testing and higher test margins.
Tunable Lasers: Silicon photonics expands tunability options for communications and scientific lasers Semiconductor optical amplifiers and other on- and off-chip components are being integrated in miniaturised, efficient silicon-photonics-based transceiver devices to enable broadly tunable lasers for communications and other scientific applications.
Cloud computing, social networks, and upcoming 5G-enabled apps need vast computational power in data centres, as well as substantial network capacity to access and integrate them.
This tendency has expedited the deployment of high-capacity coherent technology in metro networks and datacenter interconnections (DCI) from long-haul to metro networks.
These DCI applications with shorter reach (about 80 to 100 km) are very sensitive to the cost, size, and power consumption of optical coherent transceivers.
Similar to what happened in the electronics sector in recent decades, integration has become the key to bringing down the cost and size of optical components, resulting in significant breakthroughs in the field of integrated silicon photonics (SiPho).
The SiPho Coherent Optical Sub-Assembly (COSA) exemplifies silicon’s functional integration, cost advantage, and manufacturability. It combines a coherent modulator with an integrated coherent receiver and contains tens of optical capabilities on a 1 cm2 silicon chip, resulting in a much reduced device size and cheaper cost.
Since the introduction of the SiPho COSA, there has been an increased interest in developing wavelength-tunable lasers utilising SiPho technology. Such on-chip integration of separate optical components can reduce the cost of tunable lasers by lowering the number of parts and simplifying assembly.
Furthermore, better integration or co-packaging of a SiPho tunable laser with a SiPho COSA will give the final piece of the jigsaw needed to construct a comprehensive SiPho solution for next-generation low-cost coherent transceivers.
While SiPho tunable lasers have the potential to be a low-cost, low-space solution for coherent communications and other applications, its commercialization has been hampered by a few drawbacks.
First, light emission on silicon is still difficult due to the indirect bandgap of silicon. One interesting option is to use butt-coupling methods to integrate SiPho devices with light-emitting III-V materials. Such passive alignment, however, necessitates sub-micron precision as well as great reproducibility and throughput.
This is extremely difficult, and the resulting reduced laser power is insufficient to compensate for the significant loss of high-speed coherent modulators.
Second, extending the length of the silicon cavity is a simple approach to create more ‘pure’ laser light (with a very small linewidth) to transport more information in coherent communications. However, the transmission loss of a silicon waveguide is substantially larger than that of free-space optics and other material waveguides such as silica, making a lengthy silicon cavity impracticable.
Finally, silicon has a significant thermo-optic coefficient. As a result, these SiPho laser cavities are particularly sensitive to any thermal disturbance, such as changes in ambient temperature or laser current. As a result, building a SiPho tunable laser with a high frequency accuracy of 1 GHz is extremely difficult.
The combination of SiPho technology with tunable lasers will continue to drive down device costs due to fewer components and fewer assembly and process processes. One of the major problems for SiPho tunable lasers is to couple light into and out of sub-micron waveguides.
Low-loss and high-throughput chip coupling is necessary to match the performance of classic systems utilising separate optics. SiPho chip layout design innovations, optimised chip-to-chip and chip-to-fiber coupler designs, and sophisticated automated alignment technologies to reach a commercial product in the near future.
