Design of integrated-mirror etalons for photonic switching

In this paper we report a method of designing integrated-mirror etalons for photonic switching without time-consuming numerical calculation. It consists of the following two-step process: (1) find the minimum reflectance to obtain the maximum allowable linewidth of an etalon, and (2) find the number of the quarter-wave layers in each mirror of the etalon to obtain the reflectance given by step 1. The condition for maximum transmission in an integrated-mirror etalon is also derived. Under this condition we can achieve the required linewidth with the minimum number of quarter-wave layers.