Tunable narrow band add-drop filter design based on apodized long period waveguide grating assisted co-directional coupler

Abstract

Tunable add/drop filter based optical interconnects are an integral part of data centers as well as optical communications. Although add/drop filters based on ring resonators and waveguide Bragg gratings are well developed, long period waveguide grating (LPWG) based add/drop filters have little been investigated so far. In this article, we propose an apodized LPWG assisted co-directional coupler for narrow band add/drop filtering by combining silicon (Si) waveguide with titanium dioxide (TiO2) waveguide geometry. The proposed structure has been analyzed by combining the finite element method (FEM) and transfer matrix method (TMM), showing a good side lobe suppression ratio (SLSR) equal to 25.7 dB and an insertion loss of 0.6 dB. Owing to the high group index difference of Si and TiO2 waveguides, a narrow band response of 1.4 nm has been achieved with 800µm long LPWG. The opposite thermo-optic coefficients of Si and TiO2 ensures a good thermal tunability of the central wavelength. Considering a thin metallic heater of titanium nitride (TiN) the thermal tuning efficiency is found to be 0.07 nm/mW. Further, two LPWGs have been cascaded to realize a tunable dual channel filter with a minimum channel spacing of 185 GHz and a channel crosstalk better than 20 dB, showing its potential application towards dense wavelength division multiplexing.