Abstract

Recently, lasers and amplifiers have been combined in photonic integrated circuits (PICs) in order to increase output powers [1-3], for example for use as pump sources for Er⁺-doped fiber amplifiers [4]. High power pulse sources are also in high demand for such applications as optical clock sources in demodulation schemes employing fiber nonlinearities, which are capable of handling very high data rates [5,6]. Previously, high power pulse trains have been obtained using external optical amplifiers. Here, we present results on using a PIC as a high power pulse source by gain-switching the laser section and boosting the pulse amplitude by means of the integrated amplifier. Pulses with peak powers of up to 62 mW coupled into a fiber and durations of ~37 ps have been obtained at a repetition rate of 4.0 GHz. The PIC was successfully gain-switched in the frequency range from 1 to 4 GHz.

© 1991 Optical Society of America