Low Noise Semiconductor Planar External Cavity Lasers for Fiber Optic Sensing

1550 nm DWDM planar external cavity (PLANEX) lasers are a cost effective high performance solution for interferometric, Brillouin-based, coherent Doppler LIDAR and other optical sensing applications. Performance characteristics show linewidth <3 kHz, low phase/frequency noise and very low RIN. CW output power is more than 10 mW, and up to 2W with integrated EDFA without degradation of phase noise and linewidth performance. Combination of high performance, high stability and reliability and low cost offers significant advantages for various fiber optics sensing application, including interferometric, Coherent Rayleigh and Brillouin distributed temperature and strain. OPLL based on PLANEX lasers with PM output developed for distributed BOTDA/BOTDR Brillouin sensing applications with fast tunable frequency offset in frequency range of 8-14 GHz offers several advantages over OPLL based on the conventional DFB or fiber lasers.