Athermal arrayed waveguide gratings in silicon-on-insulator by overlaying a polymer cladding on narrowed arrayed waveguides

Linghua Wang; Wim Bogaerts; Pieter Dumon; Shankar Kumar Selvaraja; Jie Teng; Shibnath Pathak; Xiuyou Han; Jinyan Wang; Xigao Jian; Mingshan Zhao; Roel Baets; Geert Morthier

doi:10.1364/AO.51.001251

Athermal arrayed waveguide gratings in silicon-on-insulator by overlaying a polymer cladding on narrowed arrayed waveguides

Appl Opt. 2012 Mar 20;51(9):1251-6. doi: 10.1364/AO.51.001251.

Authors

Linghua Wang¹, Wim Bogaerts, Pieter Dumon, Shankar Kumar Selvaraja, Jie Teng, Shibnath Pathak, Xiuyou Han, Jinyan Wang, Xigao Jian, Mingshan Zhao, Roel Baets, Geert Morthier

Affiliation

¹ Photonics Research Group (INTEC), Ghent University–IMEC, Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 41, 9000 Gent, Belgium. Linghua.wang@intec.ugent.be

PMID: 22441469
DOI: 10.1364/AO.51.001251

Abstract

Athermal arrayed waveguide gratings (AWGs) in silicon-on-insulator (SOI) are experimentally demonstrated for the first time to our knowledge. By using narrowed arrayed waveguides, and then overlaying a polymer layer, the wavelength temperature dependence of the AWGs is successfully reduced to -1.5 pm/°C, which is more than 1 order of magnitude less than that of normal SOI AWGs. The athermal behavior of the AWGs is obtained with little degradation of their performance. For the central channel, the cross talk is less than -15 dB and the insertion loss is around 2.6 dB. Good characteristics can be maintained with temperatures up to 75 °C. The total size of the device is 350 μm × 250 μm.