SOI waveguide based planar reflective grating demultiplexer for FTTH

Abstract

Recent deployments of fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) represent the fastest growing sector of the telecommunication industry. The emergence of the silicon-on-insulator (SOI) photonics presents an opportunity to exploit the wide availability of silicon foundries and high-quality low-cost substrates for addressing the FTTH market. We have now demonstrated that a monolithically integrated FTTH demultiplexer can be built using the SOI platform. The SOI filter comprises a monolithically integrated planar reflective grating and a multi-stage Mach-Zehnder interferometer that were fabricated using a CMOS-compatible SOI process with the core thickness of 3.0 ?m and optically insulating layer of silica with a thickness of 0.375 ?m. The Mach-Zehnder interferometer was used to coarsely separate the 1310 nm channel from 1490 and 1550 nm channels. Subsequently, a planar reflective grating was used to demultiplex the 1490 and 1550 nm channels. The manufactured device showed the 1-dB bandwidth of 110 nm for the 1310 nm channel. For the 1490 nm and 1550 nm channels, the 1-dB bandwidth was measured to be 30 nm. The adjacent channel isolation between the 1490 nm and 1550 nm channels was better than 32 dB. The optical isolation between the 1310 nm and 1490 and 1550 nm channels was better than 45 dB. Applications of the planar reflective gratings in the FTTH networks are discussed.