Fast Wavelength Switchable Ⅴ-Coupled Cavity Semiconductor Laser Based On Quantum Well Intermixing Technology

As the telecommunications industry enters the twenty-first century, the demand for network bandwidth continues to increase. The emergence of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), widely tunable semiconductor lasers and monolithic integration technique have greatly increased the amount of data transmitted within each fiber, while reducing the manufacturing cost of optical components. In the past few decades, quantum well intermixing (QWI) technique was proved to be a simple and effective way to achieve monolithic integration. The KrF excimer laser based QWI technology has been demonstrated to be one of the most promising methods because of the large bandgap shift and good stability.In this thesis, we developed the UV laser based QWI technology with the KrF excimer laser in the lab and successfully produced FP lasers and passive waveguides using this technology. The tested performances of FP lasers and passive waveguides are even better than the performances before quantum well intermixing. Then, we apply this technique to the V-coupled cavity laser, realizing the carrier injection-based wavelength tuning effect for the first time. The laser wavelength can be switched between 32 channels at 100 GHz spacing using a single electrode control, while side-mode suppression ratio (SMSR) reaches 35dB, comparable with heat-tuning V-cavity lasers. In addition, the tuning current is 0～40mA, much smaller than the current (> 100mA) of heat-tuning laser. Finally, we analyzed the performance of the laser wavelength switching. Switching time for adjacent channels is only about Ins, four orders of magnitude faster than the time of heat tuning. We also studied the influence of the intermediate numbers of channels for the switching time, and found that as the intermediate numbers of channels increase, the wavelength switching time also increases, and finally saturate at around 10ns. The single-electrode controlled fast wavelength switching is very promising for future wavelength routed optical networks.