We present a comprehensive design, fabrication and characterization analysis of compact silicon-on-insulator bandpass filters with widely tunable bandwidth. The filter architecture is based on an unbalanced Mach-Zehnder interferometer loaded with a pair of ring resonators. A wide bandwidth tunability (from 10% to 90% FSR) can be achieved by controlling the resonant frequency of the rings while preserving a good filter off-band rejection. Design rules are provided that take into account fabrication tolerances as well as losses. Further, the use of tunable couplers allows a more flexible shaping of the spectral response of the filter. The sensitivity with respect to nonlinear effects is carefully investigated. Operation over a wavelength spectrum of 20 nm is demonstrated, making the device suitable for channel subset selection in WDM systems, reconfigurable filters for gridless networking and adaptive filtering of signals.
We present the design and the fabrication of compact tunable silicon-on-insulator bandpass filters based on the integration of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer with ring resonators and activated via thermo-optic phase shifters. The proposed architecture provides wide filter bandwidth tunability from 10% to 90% of the free spectral range preserving the filter off-band rejection. Possible applications are channel subset selection in wavelength division multiplexing optical systems, adaptive filtering to signal bandwidth, and reconfigurable filters for gridless networking.
The coupled-mode theory (CMT) is a powerful approach routinely used to calculate the effects of spatial mode interactions in perturbed structures, such as optical waveguides. One of its basic hypotheses requires that perturbations are weak. This is usually not the case for devices fabricated with modern semiconductor-based technologies. In this paper, the CMT is studied in these critical cases to assess its validity. Attention will be focused on the quite common case of parallel coupled waveguides. For these structures, results can in fact be compared to the exact ones, obtained using super-modes. The study will show that not all the possible expressions of the coupling coefficients are equivalent, and which one can be pragmatically used to obtain results with minimum errors with respect to exact solutions.
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