Tunable laser

Abstract

A tunable laser has a multiple ring resonator comprising a plurality of ring resonators having respective ring-shaped waveguides and respective different optical path lengths, an input / output side optical waveguide coupled to the multiple ring resonator, an optical input / output device such as a laser diode coupled to the input / output side optical waveguide, a reflection side optical waveguide coupled to the multiple ring resonator, an optical reflector coupled to the reflection side optical waveguide for removing light at an unwanted wavelength and reflecting light at a required wavelength, and a wavelength varying mechanism for changing the resonant wavelength of the multiple ring resonator.

Description

technical field [0001] The invention relates to a tunable laser whose oscillation wavelength can be changed. Background technique [0002] As broadband communication becomes more and more popular, it is attempted to introduce a WDM (Wavelength Division Multiplexing) transmission system capable of communicating with a plurality of different optical wavelengths on a single optical fiber to efficiently use optical fiber transmission paths. In recent years, the use of DWDM (Dense WSD) equipment that multiplexes optical signals of several tens of wavelengths to facilitate higher-speed transmission is increasing. Efforts are underway to commercialize ROADMs (Reconfigurable Optical Add-Drop Multiplexers) for adding or dropping optical signals of desired wavelengths at each node in an optical network. If the ROADM system is introduced into the communication environment, the flexibility of the optical network will increase significantly, because they can switch the optical path by c...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

[0012] The object of the present invention is to provide a tunable laser that can solve the problems of conventional tunable lasers, has high reliability, high performance and low cost, and has a simple setting for monitoring the wavelength

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