Experimental demonstration of a tunable laser using an SOA and an Opto-VLSI Processor

In this paper we propose and experimentally demonstrate a tunable laser structure cascading a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) that generates broadband amplified spontaneous emission and a reflective Opto-VLSI processor that dynamically reflects arbitrarily wavelengths and injects them back into the SOA, thus synthesizing an output signal of variable wavelength. The wavelength tunablility is performed using digital phase holograms uploaded on the Opto-VLSI processor. Experimental results demonstrate a tuning range from 1524nm to 1534nm, and show that the proposed tunable laser structure has a stable performance.