HIGHLY COMPACT SILICA-BASED PLC-TYPE 1 X 32 SPLITTERS USING 127 MU M-SPACING OUTPUT AND 0.4%-DELTA WAVEGUIDES

Highly compact 1 × 32 splitters were fabricated using silica-based planar lightwave circuit (PLC) technologies. The chip size was reduced to 6 × 24 mm2 by using a 127 µm-pitch fibre array and 0.4%-Δ waveguides with a 15 mm bending radius. This is ~1/4 of the size of a conventional 1 × 32 splitter. The assembled splitter modules showed low insertion losses of < 16.9 dB.