An integrated coupled-cavity 16-wavelength digitally tunable laser

We present a digitally tunable laser that was realized by coupling two wavelength periodical four-channel lasers. The lasers were coupled with a multimode interference coupler, in such a way that the device has a common intracavity output waveguide containing the full multiplexed signal. In the two laser cavities, 1 /spl times/ 4 PHASARs were used with a channel spacing of 100 and 400 GHz, respectively. By coupling each PHASAR to four semiconductor optical amplifiers, 4 /spl times/ 4 channels were generated. The measured SMSR for each of the 16 wavelengths is better than 40 dB.