Chirp reduction of directly modulated semiconductor lasers at 10 Gb/s by strong CW light injection

Abstract

The influence of strong light injection on the reduction of the dynamical linewidth broadening of directly current-modulated semiconductor lasers at high bit rates is theoretically investigated and experimentally verified for 10 Gb/s NRZ pseudorandom modulation with a large current swing of 40 mA pp. Significant chirp reduction and single-mode operation are observed for bulk DFB, quantum well DFB lasers at 10 Gb/s and a weakly coupled bulk DFB laser at 8 Gb/s, so that an improvement of the transmission performance using standard monomode fibers in the 1.55 /spl mu/m low-loss wavelength region can be achieved for all these laser types, where dispersion otherwise causes severe penalties for long-haul transmission. The properties of injection-locked bulk DFB and quantum well DFB lasers with respect to high bit rate modulation have been systematically studied by the use of the rate equation formalism. A dynamically stable locking range of more than 30 GHz under modulation has been found for both laser types with injection ratios higher than 0.5.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>