Three-mode all-optical (de)multiplexing on a SOI chip

Abstract An on-chip three-mode division multiplexing circuit using a simple ADC-based TE 0  &  TE 1  &  TE 2 (de)multiplexer is demonstrated to improve the link capacity of on-chip optical interconnects. The proposed (de)multiplexer does not contain any tapered waveguide which is different from the previous mode (de)multiplexer based on ADCs. Here, we choose multimode waveguide width first and then confirm corresponding width of the other two waveguides. Thus the bus waveguide without any tapers can not only reduce complexity of (de)multiplexer but also reduce difficulty of the fabrication. Our simulation results show that the hybrid multiplexer has relatively low loss and low crosstalk about −40  dB, −26.99  dB and −28.72  dB for each mode around 1550  nm with a width-variation w =± 25  nm. These properties make the proposed mode-(de)multiplexer suitable for application in high-capacity data transmission.