High-Performance 32-Channel Silicon Arrayed Waveguide Grating With 100 GHz Spacing

Abstract

A high-performance 32-channel silicon arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) with 100 GHz spacing is designed and fabricated using 180-nm lithography platform for massive production. For the arrayed waveguides, a rectangular structure compositing of a straight waveguide and a 90-degree bend waveguide is designed. Moreover, the overall structure only needs to be etched once to reduce the error introduced in the fabricating process. The experiment results show that the AWG operates with high performance within short, central, and long wavelength bands (i.e., S+C+L bands). Taking the measured central wave band (C band) as an example, a channel uniformity of 2.05 dB, a crosstalk lower than -20 dB, and an insertion loss less than 4.85 dB are achieved across the wavelength range from 1544 nm to 1576 nm. As far as we know, this fabricated silicon AWG demonstrates the best comprehensive performance for <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$32\times 100$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -GHz channels achieved using lithography, which will be highly desirable for wavelength division multiplexing communication and microwave photonics systems.