Spectral Design of Silicon Integrated Bragg Gratings: A Tutorial

Integrated Bragg gratings (IBGs) developed on the silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform, owning to their high spectral flexibility, are showing great potential for many optical applications such as optical telecommunications and optical signal processing. In this tutorial, we describe how to design SOI-based IBGs to achieve arbitrary, complex, spectral responses. The overall design flow of IBGs is first introduced, followed by detailed elaborations of each individual step of the design and implementation process. Then, design examples of two SOI IBG-based, advanced optical devices, which are a multichannel photonic Hilbert transformer and a flattop, dispersion-compensating filter, are described, to further illustrate the design methodology. Finally, a conclusion of this tutorial and an outlook of the future work are given.