Cascade self-induced holography: a new grating fabrication technology for DFB/DBR lasers and WDM laser arrays

A method of fabricating submicron gratings for optoelectronic devices from a glass mask was proposed and demonstrated. The glass mask has gratings on both sides with a period of at least four times the final feature size. By introducing an offset to the grating periods on the mask, one can achieve multiple-period gratings with a very fine period spacing for advanced wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) devices. In this paper, we demonstrated 0.5-μm second-order gratings for 1.55-μm DFB lasers and gratings with a 6-Å period difference for a four-channel WDM laser array using only optical sources. The Moire pattern caused by the spatial frequency beating was also observed and discussed. The Moire pattern could serve as an effective tool to measuring wavelength channel spacing between devices with an unprecedented (0.1 Å) resolution