Wavelength-tunable filter utilizing non-cyclic arrayed waveguide grating to create colorless, directionless, contentionless ROADMs

With the continuous increase in Internet traffic, reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexers (ROADMs) have been widely adopted in the core and metro core networks. Current ROADMs, however, allow only static operation. To realize future dynamic optical-network services, and to minimize any human intervention in network operation, the optical signal add/drop part should have colorless/directionless/contentionless (C/D/C) capabilities. This is possible with matrix switches or a combination of splitter-switches and optical tunable filters. The scale of the matrix switch increases with the square of the number of supported channels, and hence, the matrix-switch-based architecture is not suitable for creating future large-scale ROADMs. In contrast, the numbers of splitter ports, switches, and tunable filters increase linearly with the number of supported channels, and hence the tunable-filter-based architecture will support all future traffic. So far, we have succeeded in fabricating a compact tunable filter that consists of multi-stage cyclic arrayed-waveguide gratings (AWGs) and switches by using planar-lightwave-circuit (PLC) technologies. However, this multi-stage configuration suffers from large insertion loss and filter narrowing. Moreover, power-consuming temperature control is necessary since it is difficult to make cyclic AWGs athermal. We propose here novel tunable-filter architecture that sandwiches a single-stage non-cyclic athermal AWG having flatter-topped passbands between small-scale switches. With this configuration, the optical tunable filter attains low insertion loss, large passband bandwidths, low power consumption, compactness, and high cost-effectiveness. A prototype is monolithically fabricated with PLC technologies and its excellent performance is experimentally confirmed utilizing 80-channel 30-GBaud dual-polarization quadrature phase-shift-keying (QPSK) signals.