Thermooptic planar polymer Bragg grating OADMs with broad tuning range

Abstract

Tunable optical add/drop multiplexers (OADMs) were achieved by combining thermally tunable planar polymer Bragg gratings with optical circulators. The gratings exhibit better than 45-dB reflection with no detectable out-of-band reflection. Apodization was utilized to achieve strong sidelobe suppression, and symmetric gratings with uniform strength across the core and cladding layers were used to minimize coupling to cladding modes. These OADMs have a high-bandwidth utilization (BWU) factor of 0.92, with a minimum channel spacing of 75 GHz. They are tunable at a rate of -0.256 nm//spl deg/C. Tuning over a 20-nm range was demonstrated with a single device.