Ultra-Compact Birefringence-Compensated Arrayed Waveguide Grating Triplexer Based on Silicon-On-Insulator

Abstract

We demonstrate an ultra-compact birefringence- compensated arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) triplexer for application in optical network units (ONUs) based on silicon nanowire waveguides. The cross-order design is employed to cover three operating wavelengths of 1310, 1490 and 1550 nm for the triplexer. The large birefringence of the silicon-on-insulator (SOI) waveguide is compensated by using angled star coupler design in combination with different diffraction orders for TE and TM modes. The device has a small footprint of only $0.18\times 0.12\ {\rm mm}^{2}$ . The excess loss for TM polarization for three channels is 3 $\sim$ 4 dB and the crosstalk is better than $-$ 18 dB. The polarization dependent wavelength shift $({\rm PD}\lambda)$ is reduced from about 370 nm to less than 2.5 nm for wavelength channels at 1490–1550 nm.