Optimal design of a 4  ×  4 MMI thermal optical switch with trapezoidal air trenches

Abstract

Optical switches are important in signal routing and switching. In this paper, a thermal optical switch with trapezoidal air trenches is proposed. The proposed structure consists of two cascaded 4 × 4 multimode interference (MMI) couplers. The beam propagation method is used to optimize the dimension and analyze the characteristics. Simulation results show excess loss (EL) and insertion loss (IL) are less than 0.14 dB and 0.22 dB at the wavelength of 1550 nm, respectively. Besides, the extinction ratio (ER) is higher than 21 dB. This design has the advantages of small size, low loss, and high flexibility, which is promising for application to all-optical network routing.

Polymer and Hybrid Optical Devices Manipulated by the Thermo-Optic Effect

“…The thermo-optic temperature sensor also achieves the induction temperature change through this principle. Thermo-optic devices can be realized by interference-type Mach–Zehnder interferometers (MZIs) [ 13 , 14 ], multimode interference (MMI) [ 15 , 16 ], Michelson interferometers (MIs) [ 17 , 18 ], adiabatic evolution-type Y-branches [ 19 , 20 ], directional coupling (DC) [ 21 , 22 ], and total internal reflection (TIR) [ 23 , 24 ], as shown in Figure 1 .…”

Low-Power-Consumption and Broadband 16-Channel Variable Optical Attenuator Array Based on Polymer/Silica Hybrid Waveguide

“…To realize a power-efficient and large-scale integration optical device, low power consumption is necessary and important to prevent central wavelength shifts and power consumption in a thermo-electric cooler (TEC) [14,15]. Polymer-based PLCs with TOCs one order higher than silica-based ones have been considered to solve the issues of high port count VOA and switch array [16,17]. To integrate AWG, the operating wavelength range of the VOA must be wide enough for wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) scenarios [18,19].…”