Long-Reach Transmission Characteristics of Tunable External Cavity Laser

We report the transmission capability of a tunable external cavity laser (T-ECL) that utilizes a super-luminescent diode (SLD) and a polymer Bragg reflector (PBR) operating with a direct modulation of 2.5 Gb/s for a light source of a long-reach wavelength division multiplexed-passive optical net- work (WDM-PON). The T-ECL successfully operated at an ambient temperature of -20 °C to 70 °C when employing a cooled SLD. A tuning range of 12-nm is achieved with a tuning power of lower than 80 mW. A side mode suppression ratio of more than 35 dB was obtained for the whole tuning range. The linewidth of the lasing spectrum is less than 0.1 nm at 20 dB from the peak power. The transmission performance of the T-ECL, including an optical bandpass filter (OBPF), is better than that of the T-ECL excluding an OBPF for a long-reach transmission over 80 km of single mode fiber (SMF). The power penalty of the T-ECL is less than 1.4 dB when using an OBPF for an 80-km transmission.