STRONG SAMPLED BRAGG GRATINGS FOR WDM APPLICATIONS

Strong sampled Bragg gratings are UV induced in planar low-loss silica waveguides. Using such gratings, multichannel wavelength-division-mul tiplexing (WDM) components can be manufactured with high precision. An ASE filter and multichannel add/drop multiplexer have been demonstrat ed and characterized using sampled gratings and optical circulators. T he add/drop multiplexer exhibits an intraband crosstalk of -30 dB and an interband crosstalk of -20 dB when used with a 200-GHz channel spac ing. Simulations using a matrix method are performed showing that the use of uniform sampled gratings is limited by interband crosstalk to c hannel spacings of around 100 GHz. Propagation losses induced by the a mplitude modulated superstructure of sampled gratings are investigated .