A modified SAG technique for the fabrication of DWDM DFB laser arrays with highly uniform wavelength spacings

A modified selective area growth (SAG) technique, in which the effective index of only the upper separate confinement heterostructure (SCH) layer are modulated to obtain different emission wavelengths, is reported for the fabrication of dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) multi-wavelength laser arrays (MWLAs). InP based 1.5 mu m distributed feedback (DFB) laser arrays with 0.8 nm, 0.42 nm, and 0.19 nm channel separations are demonstrated, all showing highly uniform wavelength spacings. The standard deviation of the distribution of the wavelength residues with respect to the corresponding linear fitting values is 0.0672 nm, which is a lot smaller than those of the MWLAs fabricated by other techniques including electron beam lithography. These results indicate that our SAG technique which needs only a simple procedure is promising for the fabrication of low cost DWDM MWLAs. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America