Analysis of the 1×8 monolithically integrated InP based wavelength selective switch

To cope with the exponential growth of the communication network traffic demand, programmable optical wavelength selective switches (WSS) with large bandwidth, speed, and flexibility have become key elements in optical Datacom and Telecom networks. The proposed WSS structure involves the co-integration of active and passive components on-chip. The optical signal power is distributed to multiple wavelength blockers (WBL) via an optical power splitter. WBLs consist of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer-based interleaver to separate the input WDM channels and an array of semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOA) which act as both optical gates and gain elements in order to achieve lossless operation. The arrayed waveguide gratings (AWG) function as multiplexers and de-multiplexers in the WBL structure. In this work, the system performance of the 1×8 WSS architectures has been numerically investigated. To this end, we have assumed 64-λ WDM input signal with 12.5 GHz spectral spacing and analyzed the WSS performance by studying the steady-state impulse response of hybrid time and frequency domain simulation.