Reported is an add/drop wavelength filter which operates independently of light polarisation based on silicon wire waveguide technology. The filter is composed of a reflective mode conversion grating and a mode split coupler. Polarisation independence is archioved by waveguide and grating design, and is verified by experiments. Optical crosstalk at the designed add/drop wavelength for transverse-electric (TE) and transverse-magnetic (TM) polarisations are 13 and 18 dB, respectively. The total length of the filter is greatly reduced compared with the previously reported one by more than 50% with the newly proposed design.Introduction: Many research efforts have been reported on the development of silicon (Si) photonics technology [1-10], because Si wire waveguides have a strong light confinement effect and the corresponding size of waveguide circuits can be reduced to as small as electronic circuits. Since Si photonics device fabrication process is compatible with conventional complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) processes, low-cost and compact electro-photonics integrated devices are realised on the same chip.In the wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical network systems, a wavelength filter is required to separate wavelength channels. Our application target is an optical network unit (ONU) for the fibre to the home (FTTH) systems, in which the wavelength filter is required to work independently of light polarisation over a relatively wide wavelength range ( 1300 -1550 nm). Although various types of waveguide filters have been studied [1-10], grating-based filters seem to be promising owing to their flexible wavelength selectivity, flat-top bandpass spectra, and wide free spectral range (FSR) [7-9] for FTTH WDM filters.We previously reported a polarisation-insensitive Bragg grating filter with total device length of about 400 mm [7]. In this report, we drastically reduce the device length by more than 50% with a newly proposed polarisation-independent Bragg grating and experimentally verify its performances.