Tunable Fiber Laser Using a MEMS-Based in Plane Fabry-Perot Filter

We propose a tunable erbium doped fiber laser based on a Fabry-Perot (F-P) cavity tuned by an electrostatic actuator. The device is made of single crystalline silicon. The F-P cavity consists of two Bragg mirrors, one being displaced by a comb-drives actuator. The F-P cavity, grooves for optical fibers and electro-mechanical structure are fabricated by deep reactive ion etching on a 70 mu m silicon on insulator wafer and are integrated in a ring fiber laser. The resulting tunable fiber laser has a tuning range of 35 nm in the C-band and a spectral width of less than 0.06 nm. The maximum applied voltage for full tuning of the laser is 37 V. The mechanical resonance frequency of the actuated mirror is 14.4 kHz allowing fast tuning of the laser. The maximum output power is 1.8mW.