Compact Silicon-Arrayed Waveguide Gratings with Low Nonuniformity

Array waveguide gratings (AWGs) have been widely used in multi-purpose and multi-functional integrated photonic devices for Microwave photonics (MWP) systems. In this paper, we compare the effect of output waveguide configurations on the performance of AWGs. The AWG with an output waveguide converging on the grating circle had larger crosstalk and lower nonuniformity. We also fabricated a 1 × 8 AWG with an output waveguide converging onto the SOI's grating circle, whose central operation wavelength was around 1550 nm. The fabricated AWG has a chip size of 500 μm × 450 μm. Experimental results show that the adjacent channel crosstalk is -12.68 dB. The center channel insertion loss, as well as 3 dB bandwidth, are 4.18 dB and 1.22 nm at 1550 nm, respectively. The nonuniformity is about 0.494 dB, and the free spectral range is 19.4 nm. The proposed AWG is expected to play an important role in future MWP systems given its good nonuniformity and insertion loss level.