External-cavity semiconductor laser tunable from 1.3 to 1.54 μm for optical communication

Using semiconductor optical amplifiers with properly designed nonidentical quantum wells made of InGaAsP-InP materials in the external-cavity configuration, the semiconductor laser is broadly tunable. The tuning range covers from 1.3 mum to 1.54 mum. Without additional filtering techniques, the laser beam emitted from the linear external cavity has the sidemode suppression ratio better than 30 dB. Also, the power ratio of the lasing mode to the total output power is 90%-99%, indicating the dominance of the lasing mode in the amplification process due to the broad gain spectrum.