Align-free Micro-optic Mach-Zehnder Interferometric Filter

A novel alignment-free micro-optic MZI filter has been demonstrated. The filter is composed of two fiber-pigtailed collimators and a beam-splittingplate with a periodically etched stripe pattern. We fabricated the plate through a standard lithographic formulation process by using a pyrex substrate glass with SU-8 resist coating on its one of the surfaces. The maximum insertion loss of the implemented filter was less than 2 dB over 1000 nm to 1600 nm and the extinction ratio was larger than 33 dB. The measured PDL within the 3-dB pass band of the filter was less than 0.15dB and the maximum extinction ratio variation was less than 2 dB even when the worst alignment error occured.