Temperature stabilized phase reference for MEMS based swept sources

MEMS tunable lasers are not inherently phase stable because Brownian motion and drive electronics noise make the starting wavelength of the sweep unstable with respect to the electrical sweep trigger. A typical solution to the problem is to use a fiber Bragg reflector wavelength trigger. That is a sub-optimal solution since environmental changes can move both the Bragg peak and the k-clock phase. We have packaged temperature controlled trigger and clock etalons in a butterfly package to solve this environmental problem. By making the wide FSR trigger etalon from silicon and the narrow FSR clock etalon from fused silica, the relative spectral positions of the trigger and clock can be adjusted through temperature control. The system has applications in background subtraction, phase-sensitive and Doppler sensing, synthetic aperture imaging, and long-term averaging to increase SNR. It can be used for direct hardware clocking of a DAQ board, as well as in a software resampling context.