Modelocked external cavity semiconductor laser for applications in photonic arbitrary waveform generation and photonic synthesis

Abstract

Summary form only given. A photonic arbitrary waveform generator (PAWG)/photonic synthesizer can be used for a broad range of functions in optical analog and digital communications, direct detection and coherent detection architectures, and RF/microwave applications. Building on our development of low-jitter modelocked semiconductor lasers, we propose a PAWG architecture that produces 1) short, low jitter optical pulses for OTDM applications, 2) coherent combs of phase locked optical carriers for dense WDM applications, 3) low noise RF/microwave clock signals, and 4) sinusoidal and pulsed intensity modulations on optical carriers with 75 GHz of instantaneous bandwidth (limited by the WDM filter bandwidth), using low RF drive signals. The novelty here is the use of a WDM filter to separate the individual longitudinal modes (as many as filter channels) of a modelocked laser. The benefit of the present approach is the potential for photonic arbitrary waveform generation through modulation of individual channels before recombining them.