Abstract

Integrated optical devices potentially offer significant advantages over their bulk counterparts in that they offer compactness, mass production (low unit cost), and relaxed alignment requirements. Fabrication in the InP material system provides the added advantage of active/passive device integration. A two-dimensional approach to integration is particularly suited to multiwavelength applications due to the effective parallelism required in such systems. In such an approach a grating structure can be incorporated within a slab structure to provide de/multiplexing of a large number of channels. Here the device loss is independent of the number of channels unlike in one-dimensional waveguide-based devices incorporating wavelength-dependent couplers,^1,2 where the device losses increase with the number of channels.

© 1996 Optical Society of America