SNR of swept SLEDs and swept lasers for OCT
(Conference Presentation)

Bart C. Johnson; Walid Atia; Dale Flanders; Mark Kuznetsov; Brian Goldberg; Nate Kemp; Peter Whitney

doi:10.1117/12.2214468

26 April 2016 SNR of swept SLEDs and swept lasers for OCT (Conference Presentation)

Bart C. Johnson, Walid Atia, Dale Flanders, Mark Kuznetsov, Brian Goldberg, Nate Kemp, Peter Whitney

Proceedings Volume 9697, Optical Coherence Tomography and Coherence Domain Optical Methods in Biomedicine XX; 96970R (2016) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2214468
Event: SPIE BiOS, 2016, San Francisco, California, United States

Abstract

A back-to-back comparison of a tunable narrow-band SLED (TSLED) and a swept laser are made for OCT applications. Both are 1310 nm sources sweeping at 50 kHz over a 100 nm tuning range and have similar coherence lengths. The TSLED consists of a seed SOA and two amplification SOAs. The ASE is filtered twice by a tunable MEMS Fabry Perot in a polarization multiplexed double-pass arrangement on either side of the middle SOA. This allows very long coherence lengths to be achieved. A fundamental issue with a SLED is that the RIN is proportional to 1/Linewidth, meaning that the longer the coherence length, the higher the RIN. High RIN also leads to increased clock jitter. Most swept source SNR calculations assume that the noise is independent of the amplitude of the signal light: The higher the signal, the higher the SNR. We show that in the case of the TSLED, that the high signal RIN and clock jitter give rise to additional noises that scale with signal power. This leads to an SNR limit in the case of the TSLED: The higher the signal, the higher the noise, so the SNR reaches a limit. While the TSLED has respectable sensitivity, the SNR limit causes noise streaks in an image where the A-line has a high reflectivity point. The laser, which is shot noise limited, does not exhibit this effect. This is illustrated with SNR data and side-by-side images taken with the two sources.

Conference Presentation

Citation Download Citation

Bart C. Johnson, Walid Atia, Dale Flanders, Mark Kuznetsov, Brian Goldberg, Nate Kemp, and Peter Whitney "SNR of swept SLEDs and swept lasers for OCT (Conference Presentation)", Proc. SPIE 9697, Optical Coherence Tomography and Coherence Domain Optical Methods in Biomedicine XX, 96970R (26 April 2016); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2214468

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KEYWORDS

Signal to noise ratio

Optical coherence tomography

Interference (communication)

Clocks

Laser applications

Tunable lasers

Laser marking

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