A High Performance, 12 Wavelength Optical Multi-Channel Controller

Abstract

An optical multi-channel controller (OMCC) is a device that gives simultaneous access to all the wavelength channels in a wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) communication system. We recently demonstrated such a device(1) that consisted of two waveguide grating routers (WGR) monolithically integrated with semiconductor optical amplifiers. The first router demultiplexes a WDM signal into its N frequency components. Amplifiers on the N outputs of the first WGR amplify these components which are subsequently remultiplexed by a second, identical WGR. By appropriately biasing the individual amplifiers, each channel can be detected and/or amplified. This functionality makes the OMCC a very powerful component for WDM systems where it could be used as tunable filter, channel equalizer, tunable receiver or WDM signal source. Our original device(1) suffered from a high on-chip insertion loss and also from interchannel crosstalk due to electrical leakage. Here, we report on a much improved version of such a OMCC capable of handling 12 WDM channels spaced by exactly 3.2nm (400 GHz).