Abstract

Wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) has enabled a significant expansion of the transmission bandwidth of telecommunication network systems. Multi-channel bandpass optical filters with a variety of structures have been proposed and developed to meet the increasing need in WDM applications, such as selecting and adding/dropping signals. To achieve these functions with good performance, the passband of the filter should have low insertion loss, square-like spectral response and zero dispersion.¹ Among these requirements, the dispersion property is becoming more crucial, especially in the high data bit rate systems, since the dispersion will lead to pulse distortion, dramatically degrading the quality of the transmission signals and, therefore, limiting the bit error rate.²

© 2002 Optical Society of America