Abstract

An optical (de)mux is one of the basic building blocks of a WDM photonic network. Both the thin film filter and the fiber Bragg grating can have high figures-of-merit ( 75%),¹ defined in this paper as 1 dB bandwidth over 20 dB bandwidth. However, they can also suffer from signifi-cant chromatic dispersion. Furthermore, they are single channel components and a cascade of these devices is required for WDM networks. As the number of wavelengths increases in a network, the waveguide-grating-router (WGR)² and the bulk diffraction grating³ are becoming increasingly more attractive. The current implementations based on both technologies suffer from low figure-of-merit (FOM). We demonstrate a multichannel (de)mux, implemented with bulk diffraction gratings, that results in high FOM and low dispersion.

© 2002 Optical Society of America