Large group delay and low loss optical delay line based on chirped waveguide Bragg gratings.

Abstract

On-chip optical delay lines (ODLs) based on chirped waveguide Bragg gratings (CWBG) have attracted much attention in recent years. Although CWBGs are well developed, the CWBG which have large group delay (GD), large delay-bandwidth product and low loss while is circulator-free have little been investigated so far. In this work, we propose and experimentally demonstrate such a CWBG-based ODL. This device is fabricated on a low-loss 800-nm-height silicon nitride platform, combining 20.11-cm long index-chirped multi-mode spiral waveguide antisymmetric Bragg gratings with a directional coupler. The bandwidth of this circulator-free ODL is 23 nm. The total GD is 2864 ps and the delay-bandwidth product is 65.87 ns·nm, which both are the largest values achieved by on-chip CWBG reported to our knowledge. Its loss is 1.57 dB/ns and the total insertion loss of the device is 6 dB at the central wavelength near 1550 nm. This integrated CWBG can be explored in practical applications including microwave photonics, temporal optics, and optical communication.