Apparatus and method of making a fused dense wavelength-division multiplexer

摘要

The present invention relates to an apparatus and method of making a Dense Wavelength-Division Multiplexer (DWDM) using a Fused- Biconical Taper ("FBT") technique. The DWDM according to the present invention comprises a multiple of Multi-window Wavelength-Division Multiplexers ("MWDMs") which cascade together in several stages, each stage has several MWDMs having an identical window spacing. For a N- channel DWDM, there are 2.sup.m-1 MWDMs cascaded in m-th stage, and the window spacing of the m-th stage MWDMs is 2.sup.m-1 &Dgr;&lgr;, where m is from 1 to (logN/log2), for example, the first stage(m=1) having 1 MWDM and the window spacing is &Dgr;&lgr;, the second stage(m=2) having 2 MWDMs and the window spacing is 2&Dgr;&lgr;, the third stage(m=3) having 4 MWDMs and the window spacing is 4&Dgr;&lgr;, etc., and the (logN/log2)- th stage has (N/2) MWDMs with a window spacing (N/2)&Dgr;. lambda.. The number N could be 2, 4, 8, 16 or more.