Modulation requirements and transmission characteristics of electrically tunable mode-locked lasers with fiber Bragg gratings

In this letter, we investigate the external modulation and transmission characteristics at 2.48832 Gb/s of electrically tunable mode-locked semiconductor lasers containing fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs). We show that the repetition rate range of these lasers should be greater than at least twice the data rate in order to achieve minimal power penalties associated with the pulsed nature of the output. We also show that, by using localized apodization and a chirped phase mask to fabricate the FBG, the spectral width of the output pulse is narrowed, which improves the dispersion tolerance.