Advances in the Design and Fabrication of High-Channel-Count Fiber Bragg Gratings

In this paper, we review our recent developments in the design and fabrication techniques for high-channel-count fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs). We have presented a theory for the phase-only sampled FBG and demonstrated that a sampled FBG of N channels would require radicN/etamiddot times higher maximum reflective index modulation than that of the single-channel FBG. We experimentally demonstrate a 45- and 81-channel linearly chirped FBG for nearly whole C-band dispersion compensation, which is fabricated with a novel diffraction precompensated phase mask. The grating specifications obtained agree well with the theoretical design. We have presented a novel method for multichannel FBG design, which enables us to design any kind of multichannel FBGs, where the spectrum response of each channel could be either identical or nonidentical. Particularly, the nine-channel nonlinearly chirped FBG, which is used as a simultaneous dispersion and dispersion slope compensator, has been demonstrated.