Single facet slotted Fabry-Perot laser and its application in photonic integrated circuits

In this paper, a single facet slotted Fabry-Perot (FP) laser is demonstrated to provide tunable, single mode operation and has been monolithically integrated into a photonic integrated circuit (PIC) with semiconductor optical amplifiers and a multimode interference coupler. These lasers are designed by incorporating slots into the ridge of traditional FP cavity lasers to achieve single mode output, integrability and tunability. With the feature size of the slots around 1μm, standard photolithographic techniques can be used in the fabrication of the devices. This provides a time and cost advantage in comparison to ebeam or holographic lithography as used for defining gratings in distributed feedback (DFB) or distrusted Bragg reflector (DBR) lasers, which are typically used in PICs. The competitive integrable single mode laser also enables the PIC to be fabricated using only one epitaxial growth and one etch process as is done with standard FP lasers. This process simplicity can reduce the cost and increase the yield.