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Abstract: We demonstrate realization of a flattop Y-Junction Planar Optical Waveguide Interleaver (YJPOWI) with a channel spacing of 100GHz through a novel scheme of folded cascaded two-stage unbalanced Mach–Zehnder interferometers (MZI) fabricated on a polymer Planar Lightwave Circuit (PLC) platform. The characteristic 0.5dB passbands of the interleaver centered at ITU wavelength grids at its two output ports were 50 and 45GHz, respectively. The operating bandwidth of the device spanned the entire C band of a fiber amplifier and it is compact in size (1.3×1.4cm2). In addition, the device is easy to fabricate and do not require any individual heater to trim its performance. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Theoretical analysis is performed for the loss characteristics of a polymer arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) multiplexer around the central wavelength of 1.55 μm with the wavelength spacing of 1.6 nm. The total loss of the device includes the diffraction loss in the input and output (I/O) slab waveguides, bent loss caused by the AWG and I/O channels, leakage loss resulted from the high refractive index substrate, and propagation loss due to the absorption and scattering of the materials of the device. The effects of some structural parameters on the loss characteristics are investigated and discussed. The computed results show that when we select the core thickness as 4 μm, core width as 6 μm, pitch of adjacent waveguides as 15.5 μm, diffraction order as 50, the number of the arrayed waveguides as 91, that of the I/O channels as 17, confined layer thickness between the core and the substrate as 10 μm, distance between the focal point and the origin as 5500 μm, and central angle between the central waveguide and the x-axis (i.e. the vertical of the symmetrical line of the device) as 60°, the total loss of the device can be dropped to the range 3.79–7.93 dB. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]