Ultrawide-band Low Polarization Sensitivity 3-µm SOI Arrayed Waveguide Gratings

An ultrawide-band (UWB), O- to L- band, polarization insensitive (PI) 1 × 12 100 GHz channel spacing arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) is designed and realized in 3-μm Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) platform. PI and UWB operations are achieved by directly exploiting the UWB 3-μm PI silicon waveguide as the arrayed waveguide. The PI AWG can be employed as demultiplexer and multiplexer in photonic integrated circuits (PIC)s, such as UWB wavelength selective switches (WSS)s. Experimental results demonstrate UWB (O- to L- band) and PI 1 × 12 AWG operation with −0.82 dB to −1.52 dB insertion losses, <−35 dB average cross-talk, 0.18 dB to 1.27 dB polarization dependent loss (PDL), and 0.006 nm to 0.041 nm polarization dependent wavelength shift (PDWS). Error-free operation at 10⁻⁹ BER were measured with power penalties <0.1 dB, <0.2 dB, and <0.8 dB for 10 Gb/s, 20 Gb/s and 35 Gb/s NRZ-OOK PRBS 2³¹-1 multi-band data, respectively.