Patent ID: 7478007

Claim:
A method of measuring the degradation in a tunable laser comprising the steps of: a. performing a first set of initial measurements on the laser to provide a reference set of measurements corresponding to a performance of the laser when no degradation has occurred, wherein performing the first set of initial measurements comprises: i. setting a gain current of the laser to a specified predetermined value; ii. setting tuning currents of the laser to zero; iii. measuring an output power, etalon, or wavelength of the laser while a current of one tuning section is increased and while currents in all other tuning sections are set to zero; and iv. repeating steps (i)-(iii) for all tuning sections of the laser; b. performing a second set of measurements on the laser where some degradation has occurred; and c. effecting a comparison of the first and second set of measurements so as to provide a measure of the degradation in the laser to compensate for the performance of the laser.