Low-crosstalk Si arrayed waveguide grating with parabolic tapers

A silicon arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) with low channel crosstalk was demonstrated by using ultra-short parabolic tapers to connect the AWG's free propagation regions and single-mode waveguides. The tapers satisfied the requirements of low-loss mode conversion and lower channel crosstalk from the coupling of neighboring waveguides in the AWGs. In this work, three different tapers, including parabolic tapers, linear tapers, and exponential tapers, were theoretically analyzed and experimentally investigated for a comparison of their effects when implemented in AWGs. The experimental results showed that the AWG with parabolic tapers had a crosstalk improvement up to 7.1 dB compared with the others. Based on the advantages of parabolic tapers, a 400-GHz 8 × 8 cyclic AWG with 2.4 dB on-chip loss and -17.6~-25.1 dB crosstalk was fabricated using a simple one-step etching process. Its performance was comparable with that of existing AWGs with bi-level tapers, which require complicated two-step etching fabrication processes.