Integrated Silicon-on-Insulator Optical Comb Demultiplexer for Elastic Optical Networks

Practical deployment of elastic optical networks requires key enabling technologies supporting the miniaturization of flexible optical transponders for provisioning large-bandwidth services at low-cost per users. A silicon photonics (SiP) reconfigurable optical frequency comb (OFC) demultiplexer based on passive optical filtering exhibiting a minimum spurious tone rejection (STR) of nearly 30dB at 12.5GHz tone spacing is here reported. Low power penalty due to inter-channel crosstalk (IXT) originated by finite STR is observed. Improved filter designs for reduced IXT and/or operation at 6.25GHz comb spacing are experimentally and numerically verified. By monolithic integration with SiP OFC sources and I-Q modulators the scheme has potentials for realizing ultra-compact multiple-flow optical transmitters with adaptive bandwidth and channel spacing.