Research on Planar Lightwave Circuit (PLC) Technology-based Novel Optical Interleavers Using High Index Contrast Materials

Network bandwidth is becoming inadequate due to the widespread use of Internet technology. Using interleavers is a possible low-cost and flexible solution to upgrading traffic capacity. An interleaver is a device for dividing or combining a set of dense and equal-spaced wavelength channels into two separate groups with twice the wavelength spacing. In doing so, it helps to relieve the stringent requirement in the design of network systems.Interleavers can be implemented based on PLC, bulk-optics, and fibre technologies, among which PLC offers the unique advantages of potentially low cost, compactness, and ruggedness. A new PLC trend is towards the use of high-refractive-indexcontrast (HIC) materials, which allow a much higher packing density than conventional PLC materials such as silica. Silicon oxy-nitride and polymers are the two potential candidates as HIC materials. Although these materials have attracted much attention recently, no detailed studies on such a kind of PLC-based interleaver have been conducted. Apart from basic parameters, issues including flat and broad pass-band, tunablity, polarization insensitivity, pass-band asymmetry, and reliability need to be addressed. Therefore, the objectives of this project are to investigate how the above mentioned issues can be implemented in PLC-based interleavers using HIC materials.