Design Analysis and Experimental Verification of Cross-Order AWG Triplexer Based on Silica-on-Silicon

A compact arrayed waveguide grating triplexer with silica waveguides on silicon is designed, fabricated, and characterized. Different cross-order designs, which utilize different diffraction orders to cover a large spectral range from 1310 to 1550 nm, are analyzed in detail. B-Ge codoped upper cladding is used to facilitate the gap filling between the waveguides to reduce the loss and the polarization sensitivity. The measured spectra confirmed the operation principle of the cross-order arrayed waveguide grating design, with channel wavelengths and passbands consistent with simulations.