Tunable Monolithic DWDM Band-Selection Interleaver Filter Switch on Silicon-on-Insulator Substrate

A tunable band-selection interleaver filter switch formed on a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) substrate for dense wavelength-division-multiplexing (DWDM) system was fabricated, and its fundamental performances were experimentally demonstrated. The device consists of monolithic integration of a Michelson interferometer (MI) structure with two arm-waveguides with different lengths, appropriately designed for ITU-grid separation, a phase-modulation electrode on one arm and tunable wideband Bragg gratings reflectors. An SOI rib waveguide structure with a medium mode size was adopted for low loss and easy fabrication. A bandwidth of the grating, formed by electron beam (EB) lithography and deep reactive-ion etching (Deep-RIE), was rather large of 4 nm at -10 dB transmission level, from which a large coupling coefficient of the Bragg grating of 105 cm^-1 was evaluated. A large tuning range of the Bragg grating of 17 nm was obtained. An extinction ratio of the interleaver filter was about 18 dB, and the interleaving switching was also attained with an applied electric power of 50 mW and a switching speed of about 1 ms.