Integrated Bragg gratings in spiral waveguides

Abstract

Over the last two decades, many filters requiring custom spectral responses were obtained from photo-inscribed fiber Bragg gratings because of the flexibility inherent to this technology. However, Bragg gratings in silicon waveguides have the potential to provide faster and more efficient tuning capabilities when compared to optical fiber devices. One drawback is that Bragg gratings filters with elaborate spectral amplitude and phase responses often require a long interaction length, which is not compatible with current integration trends in CMOS compatible photonic circuits. In this paper, we propose to make Bragg gratings in spiral-shaped waveguides in order to increase their lengths while making them more compact. The approach preserves the flexibility of regular straight grating structures. More specifically, we demonstrate 2-mm long gratings wrapped in an area of 200 µm x 190 µm without any spectral degradation due to waveguide curvature. Furthermore, we interleave three spiral waveguides with integrated gratings thereby tripling the density and demonstrate good phase compensation for each of them. Finally, we show that this approach is compatible with phase-apodization of the grating coupling coefficient.