Birefringence compensated arrayed waveguide grating

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In this paper we review our work on birefringence compensated arrayed waveguide grating. We elaborate on a birefringence compensation technique based on angled star couplers in arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) and discuss several demonstrations both in low-index-contrast and high-index-contrast material systems. A 16-channel AWG with 100GHz channel spacing for DWDM application is designed and fabricated in silica-based low-index-contrast waveguide. The experimental results confirm that the polarization-dependent wavelength shift (PDλ) can be tuned by varying the incident/diffraction angle at the star couplers and a birefringence-free property can be achieved without additional fabrication process as compared to conventional AWG. A further validation of this technique is demonstrated in high-index-contrast silicon-on-insulator waveguide, in combination with different diffraction orders for TE and TM polarizations. A birefringence compensated silicon nanowire AWG for CWDM optical interconnects is designed and fabricated. The theoretical and experimental results show that the PDλ can be reduced from 380–420nm to 0.5–3.5 nm, below 25% of the 3 dB bandwidth of the channel response in the wavelength range of 1500 to 1600nm.