Abstract

We discuss the design and demonstration of 4-channel coarse wavelength-division (de-)multiplexers based on cascaded Mach–Zehnder interferometer (MZI) lattice filters and arrayed waveguide gratings (AWG) on a 150 nm silicon nitride (Si₃N₄) platform. The 1 × 4 (de-)multiplexers are designed for a channel separation of 25 nm and operate within 990–1065 nm for bottom emitting vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSEL)-based optical links. For Si₃N₄ Gaussian AWGs, we demonstrate crosstalk <−35 dB at the peak transmission band with insertion loss <0.5 dB. Measurements were performed over many dies, and pass-band standard deviations for channel 1–4 are 0.49, 0.66, 0.42, and 0.37 nm, respectively. Results for flat-top AWGs indicate crosstalk <−20 dB, with insertion loss <3 dB for the best devices. Flat-top cascaded 2^nd order and 3^rd order MZI lattice filters show a minimum of crosstalk <−15 dB and <−20 dB, respectively. The pass-band temperature shift was determined to be 14.5 pm/°C, which is lower than reported values for silicon. The device footprint of the Gaussian and flat-top AWGs are both ∼670 × 200 μm. The device footprint of the flat-top cascaded 2^nd order and 3^rd order lattice filters are 1160 × 470 μm and 1570 × 470 μm, respectively. We believe the Si₃N₄ platform has potential for its use in CWDM and possibly DWDM transceiver/optical-modules for data/computer communication in high temperature environments up to 80 °C.

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