Integrated Tunable Optical Dispersion Compensator Consisting of Arrayed Waveguide Grating With Air Trench Output Waveguides

This paper proposes an integrated tunable optical dispersion compensator (TODC) which consists of an arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) with air trench output waveguides and waveguide-type phase modulators based on thermo-optic effect. The air trenches are formed on both sides of each output waveguide to minimize the size of AWG. One TODC design for compensating chromatic dispersion (CD) channel by channel with a tunable range from -402 ps/nm to 402 ps/nm and another TODC design for compensating chromatic dispersions of multiple channels simultaneously with a tunable range from -783 ps/nm to 783 ps/nm are introduced. Finally, a TODC consisting of two cascaded TODCs is analyzed, which peak-to-peak group delay ripple is as low as 0.9 ps, when its CD can be tuned from -776 ps/nm to 776 ps/nm.