Fabrication of sidelobe-suppressed InP-InGaAsP vertical coupler optical filter using pair grating structure

In this letter, we report -19-dB suppression of sidelobes in a grating-assisted codirectional coupler (GACC) optical filter, which is the lowest to the best of our knowledge. Pair grating structures has been employed to control the coupling strength with a raised cosine functional form. A unit pair grating is composed of two unit conventional gratings and the fundamental period of pair gratings is fixed at 2/spl Lambda/, where /spl Lambda/ is the grating period of conventional GACC filter. The distance between the two gratings inside a pair grating is linearly shifted to control the coupling strength. This structure provides a spatially weighted coupling strength without any change of averaged effective optical index or propagation constant.