SNR of swept SLEDs and swept lasers for OCT.

A back-to-back comparison of a tunable narrow-band-filtered SLED (TSLED) and a swept laser are made for OCT applications. The two sources are similar in terms of sweep speed, tuning range and coherence length. A fundamental issue with a TSLED is that the RIN is proportional to 1/linewidth, meaning that the longer the coherence length, the higher the RIN and clock jitter. We show that the TSLED has an SNR limit that causes noise streaks at points of high reflection in images. The laser, which is shot noise limited, does not exhibit this effect. We add noise terms proportional to the sample power times reference power to standard swept source SNR expressions to account for the SNR limit.