AN OPTICAL NETWORK UNIT (ONU) CHIP BASED ON STACKED PLANAR OPTICS

In this paper, an optical network unit (ONU) based on stacked planar o ptics is described. The ONU chip consists of planar microlens (PML) ar rays and dielectric multilayered filters conveniently arranged to perf orm a wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) transmitter/receiver func tion. To avoid polarization dependence, nonpolarizing filters were des igned for WDM filters, half-mirrors and mirrors. An insertion loss of less than 2.5 dB and a polarization-dependent loss (PDL) of less than 0.5 dB were obtained for the 1.3 mu m port. Crosstalk was estimated to be as low as -26 dB. For the 1.55 mu m port, both insertion loss and PDL of less than 0.08 dB were obtained.