Direct Form I Active Optical Filters Realized in an Integrated Photonic Architecture

A novel integrated photonic architecture is introduced and used to realize an optical filter with direct form I realization. The architecture offers gain from semiconductor optical amplifiers, and this gain results in an active optical filter whose filter response depends on the individual gains. The presence of gain provides advantages in filter performance, and tunable and adaptive functionality. The optical filter is modeled as a discrete time system and the z-transform is used in its analysis and design. A low-pass filter design example is presented and the filter coefficients are derived in terms of gains and coupler splitting ratios. The region of stable operations is derived by applying the Schur-Cohn stability test.