External cavity laser with a vertically etched silicon blazed grating

An external cavity laser based on a stripe waveguide semiconductor optical amplifier, a ball lens, and a blazed diffraction grating fabricated by vertical deep reactive ion etching of silicon is demonstrated. Bandpass characteristics for a 12th-order grating are given. Tuning of an external cavity laser over a 120-nm spectral range is demonstrated, with a maximum single-mode fiber-coupled power of 1 mW and side-mode suppression ratio of 30 dB.