Widely Tunable Integrated Electrooptic Filter with Narrow Linewidth

The fast expanding need for fiberoptic tunable filters has motivated the development of a number of technologies including compressively tunable silica fiber gratings, Fabry-Perot based devices and accoustooptic integrated optical filters. The mature status of these technologies has unveiled their physical limits in terms of tuning speed, insertion loss, trade-off between linewidth and tuning range, cost, power consumption and complexity. Based on these short-falls a clear need for a novel tunable filter technology is established. In response to this need CoreTek proposes to develop a novel waveguide approach to tunable waveguides with broad tuning range (>100 nm), narrow linewidth (<0.1A), high speed (1nm/ns) and low insertion loss (<2dB). The center wavelength of the filter covers the range of 500 nm to over 2000nm. The proposed tunable filter has a broad range of applications, including fiber amplifier testing and spectral analysis. For Phase I work, CoreTek, Inc. proposes to fabricate the proposed tunable filter and evaluate its spectral characteristics. For Phase II work, CoreTek, Inc. will optimize the device design and performance for each specific applications by integrating the proposed tunable filter with other components such as detectors and drive electronics from compact fiberoptic devices.