Design and fabrication of wavelength tunable AWGs based on the thermo-optic effect

Abstract

In this Letter, a 16 channel 200 GHz wavelength tunable arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) is designed and fabricated based on the silicon on insulator platform. Considering that the performance of the AWG, such as central wavelength and crosstalk, is sensitive to the dimension variation of waveguides, the error analysis of the AWG with width fluctuations is worked out using the transfer function method. A heater is designed to realize the wavelength tunability of the AWG based on the thermo-optic effect of silicon. The measured results show that the insertion loss of the AWG is about 6 dB, and the crosstalk is 7.5 dB. The wavelength tunability of 1.1 nm is achieved at 276 mW power consumption, and more wavelength shifts will gain at larger power consumption.

Improved Performance of a Wavelength-Tunable Arrayed Waveguide Grating in Silicon on Insulator*

“…In our previous work, [16] widened arrayed waveguides were introduced to reduce the mode index sensitivity of waveguides with high index contrast and then to decrease the crosstalk of AWG. The error analysis of AWG with width fluctuation has been worked out using the transfer function method, which theoretically shows that the crosstalk of AWG will decrease by ∼12 dB when the waveguides in the straight section of arrayed waveguides are widened from 500 nm to 800 nm.…”