OSA / IPR/PS 2010

PTuC3.pdf

Investigation of tunable laser diode control with built-in wavelength monitoring and calibration methods
J. Kurumida*, R. Yu, A. O. Karalar, B. Guan, and S. J. B. Yoo
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Davis, 95616 email: sbyoo@ucdavis.edu *NPRC, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Tsukuba Central 2, 1-1-1 Umezono, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, 305-8568, Japan Abstract: We investigate fast tunable wavelength laser control designed for optical switching system with built-in wavelength monitoring and calibration. The combination of the AWG and photo detector array allows calibration and monitoring of fast switching TLDs. 2009 Optical Society of America
OCIS codes: (060.4510) Optical communication; (060.2330) Fiber optics communications

1. Introduction Optical path/packet/label switching technologies offer high efficiency routing in optical networks. The optical switching systems require high-speed and scalable switching fabrics with low-latency header processing. Tunable wavelength converter (WC) is one of the applicable switching elements in the system [1]. Especially all-optical type WCs can make transparent switching systems, and is able to improve switching speed compared to O/E/O type converters. The optical switching based on arrayed waveguide grating routers (AWGRs) and tunable wavelength converters provide a scalable switching fabric architecture exploiting optical parallelism [2]. In such a switch fabric, the controllability of WCs is extremely important for reducing the packet guard time and achieving low latency switching systems. Especially, high speed, high accuracy optical wavelength switching is a key issue in the system. There are several early reports for high speed tunable laser diode (TLD) control [3-5]. In addition, previous studies on OPS/OLS switching systems [6-7], included all-optical type WCs for switching; however the systems did not include sufficient monitoring and calibration schemes for tuning mechanism seen by the pass-band of the switching fabrics (e.g. AWGRs). The control board of single TLD with built-in calibration schemes for accurate wavelength control needs to be developed for high-speed switching systems. In this paper, we report on a new automatic calibration method of TLD, characterize the wavelength switching time using under various AWGR pass band conditions, and. The laser controller board was developed with digital interfaces for an optical router look-up table with built-in calibration schemes. 2. Tunable Laser Diode Board and the Automatic Calibration Method Figure 1 shows a block diagram of the TLD board with a photo-detector (PD) array and a micro-controller. A tunable laser which is used in the block diagram has four inputs for output optical signals. Three currents from three DACs determine the wavelength of optical output, and a current driver provides the gain current of the laser.
Electrical Optical
PDArray
CH1

CH8

TLD Board

Micro Controller

TEC
10 10

Current Driver Igain

AWG

Switch Controller

SMA Connectors

CPLD

DAC Ifront TunableLD (SSGDBR) Irear DAC DAC Iphase

Coupler

OPTout

10

Fig.1 Block diagram of TLD board with PD array and a microcontroller. (DAC: Digital to Analog Converter, TEC: Temperature Controller)

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The complex programmable logic device (CPLD) controls the inputs of the DACs and gives enough flexibility for creating a variable size look-up table for TLD currents. If the TLD board is used with a switch controller, that gives lambda (wavelength) request to the TLD board through SMA cables. After this process, the TLD board generates correct wavelengths for the system. At this point, the TLD board requires high accuracy wavelengths during the operation. Essentially, the wavelength calibration is executed by a counter implementation on CPLD, a wavelengthmeter, and a control program, which is synchronized with the counter. However, attempting to measure all combinations of digital bits for high-accuracy calibration requires measurements of all 230 combinations. Here, we pursue a new auto calibration method which reduces bit combination with built-in wavelength monitoring based on a PD array and feed-back control. A microcontroller processes the high accuracy wavelength control. First, roughly-calibrated wavelength table (214 combination) is set to look-up table in CPLD. Through the AWG ports, PD array detects voltage difference between PD1 and PD2, the voltage difference corresponds to relative location of wavelength. After this process, the microcontroller requests an adjusted look-up table, and completes the wavelength calibration. Figure 2 shows example spectra of wavelength calibration control. The microcontroller finds high and low peaks of the wavelength through AWG profiles.
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 1544
low mid high AWGGrid1(PD1) AWGGrid2(PD2)

Intensity(a.u.)

1545

1546

1547

1548

Wavelength(nm)
Fig.2 Spectra under the wavelength calibration control (RBW: 0.06 nm)

3. Wavelength Switching Experiment Figure 3 shows the experimental setup for switching time measurement based on Sonogram wavelength tracking. Our goal for this part is determining the switching time characteristic for a set of wavelengths under the calibrated conditions. For this experiment we used 8 wavelengths from the ITU grid. These wavelengths are equally separated from each other, starting from 1549.32nm to 1560.61nm. The Signal Generator (SG) sends a 32-bit label word that contains 4-bit switching information to a digital controller, which included a route look-up table. The controller makes a lambda (wavelength) request to the TLD Board which decides the input for three DACs. The switched optical waves pass through a tunable optical filter with 0.01nm resolution. Optical output of the filter connects to the sampling oscilloscope. A special switching time acquisition program on a PC controls the optical tunable filter and sampling oscilloscope through the GPIB control. SG instructs switching from lambda_i (wavelength_i) to lambda_j (wavelength_j). The optical filter starts sweeping the wavelength during which time the program collects the optical power level at the wavelength value. The switching time is calculated under four different conditions for AWGR channel spacings 25, 50, 100, and 150 GHz. Then, the switching times are computed based on the time interval between the power within lambda_i stays within 1 dB and the power within lambda_j stays within 1 dB within the passband of 12.5, 25, 50, 75 GHz half bandwidths (HWHM) for both wavelengths.
Electrical Optical

SG Trig.

Router LookupTable

TLDBoard

OpticalTunable Filter ControlPC

(GPIB)

Sampling Oscilloscope

Fig. 3. Experimental setup for Sonogram wavelength tracking. (SG: Signal Generator)

4. Switching Results There are 56 combinations of switching between 8 wavelengths. Fig.4 shows the measured switching time based on

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half bandwidth of AWGs. As expected, the narrowest AWGs (0.1nm) condition resulted in longest switching time compared to other broader passband AWGs, and the ratios were as large as x7. Except 12.5 GHz half bandwidth criteria, 50 of 56 of the switching times are under 12ns for HWHM= 75 GHz, 47 of 56 switching times are under 12 ns for HWHM = 50 GHz, 47 of 56 switching times are under 12 ns for half bandwidth = 25GHz. Also there is a slight difference between switching times from short to long wavelength and long to short wavelengths due to the different dynamics and hysteresis in the laser. Fig. 5 shows short to long and long to short wavelength switching time measurement by sonogram. The OPS/OLS system has AWGR for switching channels [6]. Since the output of the optical switching fabric contains fixed tunable lasers, the wavelength stability requirement for the wavelength switching is far more relaxed than that of the output wavelength lasers typically required to stay within 0.1 nm.

Short to long wavelength switching time

50 Switching time (ns) 40 30 20 10 0 0.1 0.2 0.4 AWG Half Bandwith (nm) 0.6

2 2 2 2 2 2 2 4 4 4 4 4 4 6 6 6 6 6 8 8 8 8 10 10 10 12 12 14

4 6 8 1 0 12 14 16 6 8 1 0 12 14 16 8 1 0 12 14 1 6 10 12 14 16 12 14 16 14 16 16

(a) Short to long wavelength switching

(b) Long to short wavelength switching

Fig. 4 Switching time versus AWG half bandwidth

(a) Short to long wavelength switching

(b) Long to short wavelength switching

Fig. 5 Observed waveform by Sonogram wavelength tracker (0.01nm resolution) 5. Conclusions We have investigated monitoring and calibration of rapidly tunable lasers for an all-optical wavelength converter in an optical switching system with a control board designed for self calibration and monitoring of TLD wavelengths. An automatic calibration method with PD array and microcontroller integration is proposed. Filtering profiles of AWGR support rapid wavelength switching with relaxed requirement for the TLD for broader AWGR passbands. 6. References
[1] S. J. B. Yoo, "Optical Packet and Burst Switching Technologies for the Future Photonic Internet," IEEE JLT, 24, 4468-4492 (2006). [2] S. J. B. Yoo, et al., "Rapidly switching all-optical packet routing system with optical-label swapping incorporating tunable wavelength conversion and a uniform-loss cyclic frequency AWGR," IEEE Photonics Technology Letters, vol. 14, pp. 1211-13, 2002. [3] Y. Fukashiro, K. Shrikhande, M. Avenarius, M.S. Rogge, I.M. White, D. Wonglumsom, L.G. Kazovsky, "Fast and fine wavelength tuning of a GCSR laser using a digitally controlled driver," OFC2000, WM43, 338-340 vol.2 (2000). [4] P. J. Rigole, M. Shell, S. Nilsson, D. J. Blumenthal, "Fast wavelength switching in a widely tunable GCSR laser using a pulse pre-distortion technique," OFC1997, WL63, 231-232(1997) [5] J. E. Simsarian, A. Bhardwaj, J. Gripp, K. Sherman, Y. K. Su, C. Webb, L. M. Zhang, and M. Zirngibl, "Fast switching characteristics of a widely tunable laser transmitter," IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett. 15, 1038-1040 (2003) [6] Z. Pan, H. Yang, Z. Zhu, and S. J. Ben Yoo, "Demonstration of an optical-label switching router with multicast and contention resolution at mixed data rates," IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett. 18, 307-310 (2006) [7] D. Klonidis, C. T. Politi, R. Nejabati, M. J. OMahony, and D. Simeonidou, "OPSnet: Design and Demonstration of an Asynchronous HighSpeed Optical Packet Switch," IEEE J. Lightw. Technol., 23, 29142925 (2005).

This work was supported in part by DoD under agreement number H98230-09-C0302.