Universal photonic integrated circuit architecture: The discrete Fourier Transform case

In this paper, it is shown that N spatially separated harmonically related carriers may be generated by a Generalised Mach-Zehnder Interferometer (GMZI) based architecture by replacing the N×1 combiner of a GMZI by an N×N optical Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) network; thereby avoiding the requirements of an optical de-multiplexing filter to separate the subcarriers released from the single port of an optical comb generator.