Dual-input concave diffraction grating demultiplexer based on dielectric multidirectional reflectors

Abstract

The conventional concave diffraction grating (CDG) is commonly operated as a coarse demultiplexer device due to significant increases in the chip size and cost for large dispersion. Compact dense wavelength multiplexing is proposed and demonstrated by utilizing a dual-input CDG integrated with dielectric multidirectional reflectors. This structure allows light beams incident from two different directions to be efficiently reflected and get diffracted into the respective output waveguides by a single grating, thus creating a doubled channel number and halved channel spacing while keeping the chip size constant. The dielectric multidirectional reflector is designed by one-dimensional photonic crystal theory and used as the grating tooth to provide high reflectivities over a wide angular range. Simulation results suggest that the dual-input CDG with incident angles of 1° and 6° exhibits efficiency of more than $-0.564 \,\,{\rm{dB}} $ and crosstalk less than $-21.2 \,\,{\rm{dB}} $.