Abstract

Leveraging the physical dimensions of an optical carrier (e.g., wavelength, mode, or polarization) allows significant scaling of the transmission capacity for optical communications. Here we propose a scheme for implementing on-chip silicon (de)multiplexers with simultaneous wavelength-, mode-, and polarization-division (de)multiplexing capability. The device is constructed by using cascaded subwavelength grating (SWG)-based contra-directional couplers. To verify the feasibility of the proposed structure, we perform a proof-of-concept experiment of an 8-channel (de)multiplexer with two wavelengths, two modes, and two polarizations. The insertion losses are lower than 6.6 dB and the crosstalk values are below $- 18.7\;{\rm dB}$ at around 1540 nm and 1550 nm for all the eight channels.

© 2020 Optical Society of America

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