We have developed our first generation of AWG devices using a silica-on-silicon substrate with a very thin layer of Si3N4 in the core of our waveguides. They image the field in an input waveguide onto an array of output waveguides in such a way that the different wavelength signals present in the input waveguide are imaged onto different output waveguides. These devices are capable of multiplexing many wavelengths into a single optical fiber, thereby increasing the transmission capacity of optical networks considerably. It is usually built as part of a planar lightwave circuit (photonic integrated circuit), where the light coming from an input fiber first enters a multimode. A comprehensive design of a folded-architecture arrayed-waveguide-grating (AWG)-device, targeted at applications as integrated photonic spectrographs (IPS) in near-infrared astronomy, is presented. These design of these devices are based on an.
[PDF Version]