An optical pulse width modulation generator based on the injection-locking property of single mode FP-LD

Abstract

A novel simple optical pulse width modulation generator (OPWMG) based on injection-locking property of a single mode FP-LD (SMFP-LD) has been proposed and experimentally verified. The OPWMG consists of a SMFP-LD (which acts as comparator), an optical sinusoidal wave source (analog input), and a continuous optical beam (control signal). The power required for fully injection-locking the SMFP-LD acts as the referent power whereas the combination power of continuous optical beam and analog optical sinusoidal signals work as control signals for changing the duty cycle of the proposed OPWMG. The presence of only continuous optical beam is not sufficient to suppress the dominant mode of SMFP-LD with high ON/OFF contrast ratio; however, the application of additional sinusoidal wave of constant amplitude and frequency, the dominant mode of SMFP-LD can be suppressed for the certain time window. Since, injection-locking power is dependent with the combined power of input injected continuous beam and sinusoidal optical wave, the time window of injection-locking can be varied by changing input beam power which provides different duty cycle of 13% to 68% at the output. Current available schemes for generating PWM signals are in electrical domain, hence, they need to convert electrical signals into optical domain by using expensive O/E converters for application in optical control and signal processing. The proposed OPWMG scheme has several advantages, such as low cost, low power consumption (~0.5 mW) which can be used for various applications where the effect of EMI/EMR is considered as an important factor such as control circuit for high voltage converters in power plant and electrical vehicles.