Performance on optical properties of AWG based on SOI demultiplexer and receiver sensitivity in CWDM system

Silicon-on-insulator (SOI) has become one of the popular material that is widely used to develop passive or active devices in application for modern photonics communication. Using SOI, we proposed a new double S-shaped Arrayed Waveguide Grating (AWG) with broad channel spacing of 20 nm (∼2500 GHz). This SOI-based AWG device performed with low insertion loss of <3.74 dB for a total of 16 channels where it covers the wavelength from 1311 nm to 1611 nm. The successful design of SOI-based AWG was then applied in CWDM system configuration where 10 Gb/s and 40 Gb/s data rates were used with optimized thermal noise inside the InGaAs pin photodiode and InGaAs Avalanche Photodiode (APD) at the system receiver. The maximum length of fiber was investigated for both photodetectors before the signal degraded when the bit error rate (BER) became worse than 10
⁻⁹
. Apparently, the distance of fiber can reach over 50 km when InGaAs APD was used for this system. Overall, this device that was developed on SOI material possibly increased the transmission capacity for application in metro access network.