Design trade-offs for silicon-on-insulator-based AWGs for (de)multiplexer applications.

We demonstrate compact silicon-on-insulator-based arrayed waveguide gratings (AWGs) for (de)multiplexing applications with a large free spectral range (FSR). The large FSR is obtained by reducing the arm aperture pitch without changing the device footprint. We demonstrate 4 × 100 GHz, 8 × 250 GHz, and 12 × 400 GHz AWGs with FSRs of 6.9, 24.8, and 69.8, respectively. We measured an insertion loss from -2.45 dB for high to -0.53 dB for low-resolution AWGs. The crosstalk varies between 17.12 and 21.37 dB. The bandwidth remains nearly constant, and the nonuniformity between the center wavelength channel and the outer wavelength channel improves with larger FSR values.

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