Up to 50 Gb/s modulation of an EAM integrated widely tunable DBR laser

An electro-absorption modulator (EAM) integrated widely tunable distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) laser working at 1.5 µm is reported. By utilizing the RF resonance between the bonding wire and the EAM, a 28 GHz modulation bandwidth is obtained. The device is modulated with up to 50 Gb/s NRZ data. At 28 Gb/s, the power penalty to obtain a 10−10 bit error rate (BER) after a 5 Km standard single mode fiber transmission is less than 0.7 dB. Because the DBR material has a long bandgap wavelength, the wavelength tuning range of the laser is larger than 12 nm. The DBR laser is a promising low cost tunable light source for future high capacity wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical communication systems.