INTEGRATED-OPTICS N X N MULTIPLEXER ON SILICON

We report the measured performance of an integrated N x N multiplexer fabricated using SiO2/Si waveguides. The insertion loss for N = 7 is typically lower than 2.5 dB and crosstalk is less than -25 dB. The multiplexer response is approximately periodic. In each period, the multiplexer accepts, from each input waveguide, a total of N channels, and it transmits efficiently each channel to a particular output port. Similarly, each output port receives N channels, one from each input port. Thus, the total number of channels that can be transmitted simultaneously is N2, which requires only N optical frequencies.