SIMULATION OF OPTICAL WAVELENGTH FILTER USING MULTIMODE INTERFERENCE (MMI) BASED ON SOL-GEL DERIVED ORGANIC-INORGANIC HYBRID MATERIALS

Simulation of optical wavelength filter for 1310nm and 1510nm operation on planar optical waveguides based on new VTT sol-gel derived material using Multimode Interference (MMI) technique is presented in this paper. Simulations of the material have demonstrated that in principle, similar filtering efficiency to other materials reported in MMI devices, in terms of extinction ratio (ER), it was simulated to be 18.4 and 21.6 dB for the wavelengths of 1310nm and 1550 nm, respectively. Meanwhile, the simulated insertion loss (IL) is around 1.43-1.64 dB for both filtering operations. The structure consists of two cascaded MMI sections, employing General Interference (GI) and Paired Interference (PI) mechanisms. The advantages of MMI based devices and sol-gel derived materials are discussed in this paper. The self-imaging principle, material characterizations and the final design of MMI based filter structure are also demonstrated in this paper.