Design and fabrication of compact etched diffraction grating demultiplexers based on a-Si nanowire technology

alpha-silicon nanowire waveguides and related techniques are studied. An ultra-compact etched diffraction grating demultiplexer with 10 nm spacing is fabricated and characterised. The dimension of the device is around half a millimetre, which is one to two orders of magnitude smaller than conventional silica based devices.