Fabrication-Tolerant CWDM (de)Multiplexer Based on Cascaded Mach–Zehnder Interferometers on Silicon-on-Insulator

摘要

We demonstrate a cascaded Mach–Zehnder interferometer (MZI) based coarse wavelength division multiplexing (CWDM) (de)multiplexer on silicon-on-insulator with its spectral responses well aligned to the defined wavelength grids and are highly tolerant to the manufacturing linewidth variability. This was achieved by optimizing the waveguide widths and lengths of two arms in every MZI. As-realized CWDM (de)multiplexer exhibits a spectral shift of 0.487 nm, an insertion loss of less than 2.1 dB, and a channel crosstalk of lower than −20 dB, while reference devices fabricated on the same chips suffer from serious spectral shift of 15.4 nm to the shorter wavelength and higher insertion loss/channel crosstalk. The proposed MZI design concept can be applied to all MZI-based photonic devices and related photonic integrated circuits, so this work validates a promising design path towards practical WDM applications on silicon-on-insulator.