Bandpass filter implemented with blazed waveguide sidewall gratings in silicon-on-insulator

摘要

The fabrication and experimental characterisation of a two-stage bandpass filter based on curved waveguide sidewall gratings is reported for the silicon-on-insulator platform. At each cascaded filtering stage, the spectral components of the input signal are dispersed by the diffraction grating formed in the sidewall of a silicon strip waveguide. Different wavelengths are focused onto different positions along the Rowland circle and the filter central wavelength is selected by a specific receiver waveguide. By using two consecutive filtering stages, both the filter passband profile and the stopband rejection ratio are substantially increased. The grating is apodised and chirped to ensure a constant effective index along the grating length to minimise phase distortions. Blazed geometry is used to maximise the diffraction efficiency to the 21st order. The device was fabricated with electron beam lithography and reactive ion etching using a single etch step. A bandwidth of 6.2 nm was measured near 1590 nm for the fabricated filter, with a roll-off of 4 dBm at the passband edge, and a stopband rejection of 40 dB.