Chirping of an MMI-PHASAR demultiplexer for application in multiwavelength lasers

We report the first chirped multimode interference-based phased-array (MMI-PHASAR) for application in multi-wavelength lasers (MWLs). To avoid wavelength ambiguity in MWLs, undesired orders are suppressed by chirping the array of arms in the demultiplexer. Simulations show that a suppression of adjacent orders of more than 2 dB can be achieved. A 1/spl times/5 MMI-PHASAR has been realized in which the effect of the chirping is clearly visible according to the simulations.