Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) are considered as the way to make photonic systems or subsystems cheap and ubiquitous. PICs still are several orders of magnitude more expensive than their microelectronic counterparts, which has restricted their application to a few niche markets.
Parasitic reflections can deteriorate the performance of a photonic integrated circuit. This is especially true in circuits containing amplifiers, but even in passive circuits, small reflections can already have a strong influence on circuit\ud
performance. It is known that strong reflections can be present when using a 2 × 1 multimode interference coupler (MMI) as a combiner. We investigate methods for reducing these spurious reflections in a generic integration technology. We present a novel MMI shape whose measurements show reduced reflections by 17.5 dB
Abstract:Earlier it was observed that polarization rotation in an AWG built from birefringent waveguides can result in sidelobes in its response. This effect was measured in a polarization sensitive AWG with an orthogonal layout. Now we investigate through detailed simulation whether this effect also exists in polarization desensitised AWGs. It is shown that a dispersion compensated AWG does not suffer from a polarization sidelobe. Alternatively, the AWG can be designed to minimize polarization rotation to suppress the sidelobe.
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